


Such Great Siege

by eyres



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Comic Book Science, Established Relationship, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Temporary Character Death, no spoilers for civil war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-02 22:43:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6585550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyres/pseuds/eyres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of defying his country to save his best friend, Steve Rogers agreed to a plea bargain that would grant his friends immunity but send him to prison. That was two years ago.</p><p>Bucky had a plan for when Steve finally was released from prison: a quiet house and a big bed, maybe a dog. None of his plans included Steve agreeing to sacrifice himself to save the very people that had stripped him of his title and took away his freedom. But old enemies have a way of coming back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is fully complete and will be posted as I finish editing, so a chapter every 1-2 days. 
> 
> I'm really excited to begin posting this! It's been a huge project for me after the last few months and I really hope you all enjoy!
> 
> This story takes place after a purposefully unspecified Civil War-type event. Given the movie coming out soon, I wanted to leave things purposefully vague since I'm sure that film will do better at those events than I could ever. So, while this is canon compliant through the end of Ultron, there are no spoilers for anything that occurs after that time.
> 
> The rating is for a couple scenes of violence and sexual situations between consenting adults.

Bucky wakes up, alone, at the end of it all, after everything, and immediately knows exactly what Steve has done. The bed is large and soft around him. And he is alone. His guns are laid neatly nearby, his shirt is folded over a chair, and the sun is warm through the wide window, reflecting off the dark wood of the nightstand and casting shadows on the thick gray carpet.

Steve’s clothes are gone - he’d tossed them over the chair last night, torn and dirty from days of living on the run. His shield is gone too - no longer leaning against the wall. His boots are gone from beside the door. The pillows still smell faintly of him, a slight dip in the cushion like Steve had laid on his side, propped up on his elbow, watching Bucky sleep the whole night through.

He checks the drawer. His gun is still there, ammunition loaded and safety on, just as it had been the night before. There’s no note on the nightstand, no trinket left on the pillow. When he opens the closet, he finds that Steve’s uniform is missing too. His own boots are sitting against the door, mud caked with flecks of red.

He can hear voices in the living room, almost just under the hum of the air conditioning, and he goes into the hallway, cat silent. 

Sam and Natasha are there in the kitchen, sitting at a large dark oak table with mugs of coffee and folded hands. Their faces are empty, like it’s the morning before a funeral. The coffee looks cold like they’ve been sitting, patiently waiting, for too long. They both look up when he comes in, but neither seem alarmed. Just resigned.

"What happened?" he asks. His voice is raspy, from days of shouting and running and fighting death from moment to moment. It sounds like he swallowed rooms of smoke and then sobbed after, in great heaves, while Steve pressed his fingers into his skin. He sounds beaten and tired and ready to lay down and sleep.

He had thought they were going to get that opportunity. 

Steve had carried him from the battlefield, just yesterday, held tight to his chest like he was the only victory he had wanted. His uniform had blood crusted along the chest and his eyes had still been dark with worry. But they had been alive. They had been together. With Sam and Natasha’s help, they had stumbled and skulked and finally managed to get up to the cabin, arriving just before sunset. Bucky only vaguely remembers stumbling out of the dark SUV, his head spinning from blood loss. His arm had been over Steve’s shoulder and his feet had dragged against the ground when Steve had gotten him up the wide porch and into the kitchen where Sam could stitch him up.

Then, last night, finally in the quiet and safety of their own bedroom, Steve had leaned into him, pushed their mouths together, let his hands hold tight. His skin was warm, smooth, fingers gentle as they skimmed over the deep wound that was already knitting around Bucky’s middle. He had shucked the uniform off when they arrived, dropped into the closet and forgotten in favor of treating Bucky’s wounds. Steve had been mostly alright, a purpling bruise along his jaw, but he had been moving like something deep inside had been lost. After Bucky had been bandaged and wrapped by Sam, they’d retreated to the bedroom. In the safety and silence, they had breathed together, shared air like only lovers can. They had lain in bed together, sheets pulled over them like a tent.

Steve had touched him in the dim light of the space, like he was a poem to be memorized. "I love you," he had said, sounding like a supplicant and this was his final confession. "I love you. I love you." His voice was hushed and Bucky could feel the warmth of his breath on his chin. “You’re safe now, I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

Bucky hadn't been able to say it back, in that moment, still feeling the harshness of his years with Hyrda. Bucky Barnes may have been sinking into his skin bit by bit - but he still felt removed and lost, not close enough to his old self to say the words, separated by years and pain and death from the boy that had easily told Steve Rogers that he loved him. 

Instead, he had pushed himself into Steve, taken everything he was giving and had given back what he could. He’d breathed into Steve’s mouth, taken Steve into him. He’d wrapped himself around Steve and held tight like he could protect this thing between for forever. But he hadn’t been able to say the words. He’d made promises in the dark, promises of never parting and peace and gentleness and a life away from all of this. But he hadn’t said…

And now.

Sam and Natasha still haven't said a word. They’re both studying their coffee cups like there’s some mystery in there. 

"Where did he go?" he asks again. The words are a growl, rumbling in his chest against the growing pit in his stomach.

"You're safe now," Natasha says instead of answering. She’s looking down. Sometime during the night, she had cut her hair. It’s cropped tight around her neck now and she looks deceptively vulnerable, the curve of her white shoulder blade ghostly in the bright sunlight. She looks like she’s already slipping into a new skin, shedding past pains and sorrows - slipping into something blank and clean that will hide her from all of this. "The committee issued your complete pardon from all crimes and officially instated you as a member of the Avengers just couple hours ago. You're a free man. You’re a superhero.”

Bucky feels cold in a way that has nothing to do with the cabin’s AC and everything to do with the remembered cold, fish eyes of military tribunal he’d been hauled before just the week prior - the one that had sentenced him to death before Steve had intervened. Steve had changed their mind. He had offered them something that they had wanted more. ”What did he do?" he bites out. And then, because he knows what happened - knows what Steve does in these situations, "why didn't you stop him?"

Sam looks at him, mouth drawn into a thin line. He’s bruised and weary and his shoulders are slumped. If anything, he looks more exhausted than he did last night. He would’ve done everything he could to stop Steve, to make him wait.

But Bucky Barnes is the only person left alive who's successfully stopped Steve Rogers from doing something when he's put his mind to it. And not even Bucky Barnes could stop him from throwing himself on the grenade if he really wanted to. That was Steve.

Bucky turns, strides from the kitchen. There is only himself to blame. 

The TV is already on to CNN in the small living room, sound muted, a bright news anchor on the screen. Out the windows, the sun is high in a wide blue sky over the forested hills, clouds are drifting lazily past like this is any other day. He flips on the sound as Sam comes in behind him. 

"We're live at the courthouse where Captain Rogers should be arriving any minute to remand himself into custody. Reports say that he's already surrendered all weapons and will be arriving with Tony Stark shortly."

"It was the only deal they would take," Sam says quietly. He’s trying to be gentle and it makes Bucky feel crazy. "Besides your execution."

"We could've run," Bucky says. His stomach is cold and his lungs are tight. "We talked. We were going to..." And even as he says the words, remembers the words he whispered to Steve in the dark, he realizes he should've known. 

Steve Rogers doesn't run away. He stands. 

"He's pleading guilty to conspiracy and resisting arrest," Sam continues. "There won't be a trial. They dropped the treason charge. They bargained for three years in ADX Florence. It's better than one of you dead. Or the rest of your lives as fugitives.”

"Is it?" Bucky asks. 

On the TV, the courtroom steps are flooded with reporters and protestors and supporters, cordoned on either side behind wooden barricades and stern face cops, and they're all shouting and Steve is going to walk right into them. There's uniformed cops at the top, standing between pillars and suited officials and lawyers. Officials from the UN and the Army and the government. It's a bright day, light shimmering across the white stairs and the black asphalt and the marbled building. 

Watching it now, knowing Steve is miles away, defenseless, Bucky realized that he'd been fooling himself to think this wouldn't happen. Steve carried guilt like a Catholic, even though none of it has been his fault. He felt responsible for the destruction of the last week, even though he had tried to stop it, and now he was letting himself be blamed. 

Steve doesn't run. Can't run. He faces things dead on. 

"When did he leave?" Bucky finally asks again, his metal hand whirs. 

"Seven hours ago," Sam says softly. "You slept through it."

Bucky stares down at his shirt, shifts, and feels the field stitches Sam had put in tug. Blood loss was the only thing that really knocked him out like that. Steve would have known that. He’d made sure Bucky was okay, curled around him until fell asleep, and then slipped away to throw himself on a sword. 

There's a commotion from the television. 

Black SUVs are pulling up, stopping at the curb in unison. The back seat doors open on the middle one and Stark gets out. He's in a suit and his sunglasses are just hiding the black eye that Bucky knows he has. Stark doesn't say a word, just steps aside and lets Steve slide out behind him. 

Steve is in jeans and a long sleeved t-shirt, no shield and no uniform. Someone had already taken that. The bruise on his jaw is already faded to a dull yellow, just a slight discolored sign of what had happened. He stares straight ahead like he's somewhere else, far away. He doesn't move for a long moment, stands still at the bottom of the steps as the clamor swells around him. The sun glints on his hair.

Finally, Stark touches his elbow once. 

Steve starts briefly like he had forgotten where he was and then steps forward.

Bucky clenches his fist, the metal sighs with the pressure. 

The camera tracks their steady progress through the crowd, up the stairs. The crowd swells with noise, people leaning over the wood and reaching out as if to touch. Like Steve is a god to be fondled or a relic to be dismantled.

At the top, they stop in front of the uniformed men. All of the men have guns, safeties on, but held at the ready. It’s a worthless show. Steve wouldn’t be there if he didn’t want to be.

The anchor is narrating softly and Bucky can't hear what's being said at the top of the steps. He can see mouths moving, see Steve nodding his head.

There's a long pause and then a man steps forward with handcuffs. Bucky can’t stop the flinch when they click around Steve's wrists. He knows that Steve could snap the links with a flick of his wrists - these cuffs are symbolic, not an actual restraint. It still hurts to see Steve like this. 

Steve, though, doesn’t flinch when the handcuffs go on. His shoulders move once like he had taken a deep breath, and he turns his head a little, like he’s looking at the blue sky over the tops of the crowd, like he’s looking toward the cabin in the forest that he had left behind.

A shorter pause and then they're all marching inside the courthouse, out of the camera shot. Steve is between two guards and Tony trailing behind. A large door swings open and then shuts behind them, hiding them away from the view of the camera. 

This is the last time Bucky sees Steve under blue sky for some time.


	2. Chapter 2

For the past two years, Natasha has flown into Colorado once every four weeks. She, Sam, Tony and Wanda all alternate weeks to make the trek. The fifth visit (prisoners at ADX Florence are only allowed five visits per a month) is reserved for Steve's lawyers or occasionally Maria Hill or Scott Lang or Rhodey or Clint or even Sharon Carter. All of them come alone, through a silent mutual agreement.

Monday is visiting day at ADX Florence. She drives in to the prison in a nondescript rental car and wears her hair long and flowing every time. She flirts with the entry guards when she gets the pass for her car - and with the visitor admittance manager as she gets her badge for the day.

Today, the act is a bit more of an effort. She had gotten in late last night from Cairo. The whole team had headed over four days ago when a peaceful protest had turned into a hostage crisis with international terrorists. She had taken point on this one, with James heading up the tact team while she had tried to talk the terrorists down. It had been two days of negotiations and planning and then two days of clean up and making sure the three terrorists were securely held until their trial. But they had worked well together - the op had gone flawlessly. Their team was strong and tight now - as much as they could be without Steve.

Sam was solid and steady and brave. Wanda was resourceful and powerful and unafraid. Rhodey was confident and smart and sure. And James. He carried Steve's shield into the field, now, like it was both the greatest burden and the greatest calling of his life.

There's always a brief pull of panic when the large security doors clang shut behind her. Years and months of a life spent craving and protecting her own freedom make her feel skittish inside the walls. The inside of the supermax is always deathly quiet; walls soundproofed and thick and unbreakable. It reminds her of Russia, of cold winters and cold hands and cold hearts.

After Steve had turned himself in, the US government, along with the UN, had convened the Super-Human Oversight Committee (or SHOC as everyone called it). The intention was for the panel to be the global experts on dealing with enhanced and powered humans. They were supposed to be responsible for crafting global legislation and policy to put in place guidelines around super humans: from besting utilizing their gifts, to making sure they could be neutralized if they were a threat. It was a watered down version of the Registration act (and more administrative than SHIELD) that they had tried to push through initially and everyone knew it. But with Steve gone, there was no one to lead the charge against it.

One of SHOC’s first acts after being instated had been commissioning the retrofit of this supermax so it could handle enhanced humans - as well as it’s existing human prisoners. There had been talk of creating an entirely separate jail - but human rights activists had actually balked at that one. So here they were: in the mountains of Colorado, holding Steve in a prison meant for drug lords and kingpins and terrorists.

She goes through the metal detector, empties her bag and opens her mouth for them to check. She takes off her coat and her shoes, leaves them on the little table for the guard to go through them.

Amateurs, she thinks. She's gotten in the habit (bad, she knows) of sneaking something in every time. It's always something innocuous, something that would be explainable if they did find it. But she likes the challenge, the thrill, the practice, of getting something by these guards that are supposed to be the best of the best.

There are other visitors. From men that look like they're two steps from being in here themselves to pretty girlfriends in heels and dresses to families, children clinging to mothers.

At 7:55 am, her escort comes to get her.

Steve isn't allowed in the general visiting room.

In the beginning, he'd been restricted to the video screen visiting rooms, not even allowed to be face to face with his visitors, speaking into the camera and getting the five second delay before the reply came back through the speakers. Then, after six months of perfect behavior, they had upgraded him to a private, windowless meeting room. There was clear barrier between him and his visitor, a thick pane that was bulletproof and shatter proof and could withstand up to two tons of pressure. Both sides of the room were soundproofed, a tinny speaker was used to talk. The speaker could be muted at any point by the guard observing their interactions from a control tower, 50 feet away. There were four armed guards that escorted Steve in, on top of the one that escorted her, and all waited right outside the building until they were done. The escorting guards rotate on some random schedule that Natasha hasn't been able to predict yet.

Not that she's tried to. Because she isn't breaking Steve out. He doesn't want her to - had told her specifically not to before he had left her with Sam and Bucky in the quiet house in the woods and went off to D.C. alone to face penance for crimes for which he wasn't guilty.

So she isn't breaking him out. Not yet.

Steve is pale on the other side of the glass in the visiting room. He always is now. His hair seems limp, flat and thin against his skull. He is still as muscular as the day he came in - as muscular as the day he came out of Erskine's pod, if the pictures were to be believed, but the muscles seem unnatural on him now, standing out sharply beneath sallow skin - just muscle and bone. His cheekbones jut sharply now, deep bruised hollows beneath his eyes.

He's hobbled and has thick mag cuffs that go from elbow to elbow. He wears a mask and a blindfold between his cell and the visiting room and they don't strip it off until he's through both steel doors that lead to the visiting room.

The guards sit him down at the steel chair, bolted to the floor, and he smiles at her, warm and real, while the guards fasten his manacles down. They do one last sweep and then leave the room, giving them the semblance of privacy.

"Natasha," he says. "That time again already?"

She smiles. "Time flies when you're having fun?"

Steve doesn't laugh. "Something like that."

His world, for 23 hours a day, most days, is an 8x10 cell with a bed and a toilet and a chair and a desk and a shower. For one hour a day, he's escorted to a concrete pit about the size of a small swimming pool and allowed to run or walk or sit.

He spends most of his days reading, working out as best he can, sleeping, or staring at the ceiling in silence. He's been doing more of the latter lately, Natasha knows.

Stark had hacked the 24/7 video surveillance feed of Steve's cell only one month after he'd been officially incarcerated at the facility. All of them now can access it on their phones - though they rarely do out of respect for Steve’s privacy. She knows Stark has a constant loop of it going in his lab. His own version of penance that will never fully absolve.

Steve doesn't know. They can't tell him with the constant surveillance of their communications and she doesn't think Steve would even approve if he knew.

Normally, they talk lightly. She tells him about the weather, about New York or whatever other country she’s been in. They talk about movies and TV shows and she reads him the latest news. She tells him about their friends and Bucky and the latest training they're doing.

But, today. She hesitates, bites at her lip. “I know Stark told you last week,” she finally says.

Steve goes quiet, his eyes drop. “People are afraid,” he finally says and he sounds older than he ever has. He sounds 100 and world weary and beaten.

“It’s not fair,” she snaps, uncaring of the monitors and the equipment marking her every word and expression. “You made a bargain. You had a deal. They promised…”

He looks up and his eyes are wide and dark. “I shouldn’t have trusted them,” he says. “You shouldn’t trust them,” he says more pointedly.

She bows her head, wishes she could take his hand. “Stark said his lawyers are on it. Ten years isn’t that long,” she whispers, knowing it’s a lie.

“And then it’ll be another ten years.” His voice is bitter.

Natasha hasn’t ever heard him like this. She pauses and the leans forward. "Just say the word," she says, uncaring that this is recorded. "Steve. You just need to say the word."

He breathes in and out. She's surprised he doesn't snap back, angry for discussing this with ears listening in. It almost seems like he’s considering for a moment and her heart cracks a little.

"No, Nat." His voice is hoarse. "You know what my answer is."

"This will kill Bucky," she says, soft. She knows this will hurt Steve. But this is all hurting her too. Seeing him chained and brought low and pale and tired and caged and alone.

He laughs, harsh and vulnerable. "He should be used to me doing stupid stuff." Steve hesitates and then leans forward, his chains clank against the legs of the chair. "How is he? Really? I think Sam only tells me the good stuff."

Bucky and Steve haven’t seen each other since Steve walked out of that little house and boarded a plane to the city. There was no phone call when Steve was in the dank cells beneath the Justice building. There was no visitation when Steve was first at ADX Florence and only able to communicate through video conference. There was no reunion when Steve was finally able to talk to his visitors face to face.

That had been the last clause of Steve’s plea bargain. The one that Stark fought tooth and nail and yet no one would budge on. Bucky Barnes was to have no contact with Steve Rogers for the duration of his incarceration. Officially, the government cited the likelihood of an escape attempt, the likelihood of some sort of plot. But really, it was nothing but a last cruel twist to see how far Steve would bend to their whims.

Bucky watches the feed though. If Stark is a supplicant at the alter of the feed of Steve's cell, Bucky is an addict. She knows he spends hours, just watching the feed, watching Steve like a sponge, hungry for any bit of him that Bucky can get.

"He'll give me a sign," he had told her once, when she had asked what he was watching for, months into his long vigil. "When he's ready for me to come and get him."

"What if he never does?" she had asked.

"He will."

"He misses you," she says now, to Steve. "He's still mad that you got yourself locked in here."

Steve sighs. "Yeah, I bet. But he's training with the team? Eating?"

"He's doing fine, Steve. He's a good fighter and he knows what he’s doing in the field. He likes Sam and Wanda and Rhodey. He's warming up to Tony."

Steve settles back in his chair like he's getting comfortable. "Yeah? What are he and Tony up to?"

She launches into the story and watches him close his eyes, like he's savoring this moment and holding it deep within.

 

* * *

 

Steve divides his day into segments.

He opens his eyes. The fluorescent light above him hums. He doesn't move at first. He breathes in. He breathes out. Bruce taught him this years ago, in another life. It's helpful. Starting at his toes, he flexes each muscle on the inhale, notices each movement.

It takes him almost 40 minutes to get the top of his head. 23 hours and 20 minutes to go. The process centers him, calms him, clears his mind.

He showers when he gets up, in the tiny stall in the corner of his room. Washes his hair with a shampoo that smells like cedar and then follows it with a conditioner that smells like pine. Tony had sent both bottles two months ago after spending almost an hour ranting about the condition of Steve's hair. It had taken almost a week to get through the prison security, but they had finally allowed it. His hair is longer now, shaggy around his ears and, Steve would never tell Tony but he appreciated the gesture. The stuff Tony sent him was way better than the thin greasy stuff the prison provided. It was a small bit of luxury he could cling to in the drab world.

Tony was the only one of his friends that was allowed to send him anything - and even his packages were thoroughly searched beforehand. But it was a tiny, needed, link to the outside world.

He washes his face, then his arms, and then his feet. He relaxes in the hot water then, leans against the wall with his forearm, the cool tile and the hot water contrasting on his skin. For a few moments, he can pretend he’s not here - he can pretend the walls around him don’t exist. His eyes close and he pictures Bucky, how he had left him on that last day.

Bucky had been sprawled across the sheets, soft light from the hall golden across his bare back, white bandages wrapped around his middle. There was the outline of Steve's fingers on the tops of his shoulders, fast fading but still there, faintly purple. His face had been relaxed, shadows beneath his eyes, flesh hand stretched out and open. He had been beautiful. He had been everything. Steve had said goodbye quickly, not wanting to wake Bucky from the deep healing sleep he had fallen into once his body knew he was safe. Just a press of dry lips to his forehead, a gentle hand in his hair, a long look to remember.

Steve had taken that memory with him, in the quinjet and with Stark's lawyers at the tower and up the courthouse steps and when he had looked up for the sky before they had locked him away. And, now, in this tiny, unwalled shower in his tiny cell in the tiny world that his life had become.

He leans into the thin shower spray in the deathly silence of his cell and hopes the water fully masks the way his eyes are reddening. There are guards watching, he knows. And he suspects Tony is watching too. But this is as private as his life gets now.

The towels they give him are rough and small and he dries brusquely and redresses. Only 22 hours and 35 minutes to go.

Breakfast is delivered promptly, through the slot on the heavy steel door (it’s two feet thick, specially made to withstand 200 pounds of super soldier force - he thinks Tony must’ve had a hand in it, though he’s never asked and Tony has never told). The meal is a large serving of lumpy oatmeal with milk and an apple and a cup of orange juice and a weird protein bar that tastes like cardboard.

In the beginning, they had tried to give him the same meal plan that all other healthy prisoners were on. By week two, he'd started looking thin and haggard, even on the viewing screen. By week four, when Steve hadn't been able to hide how weak and shaky he felt during a visit with Sam, Stark had somehow found out about how much they were feeding him. (Steve's still not sure how. Stark says he asked but this is one of the reasons that Steve's convinced that Stark is monitoring his cell). When Steve had nearly fainted in his cell on week five, he’d been moved to the infirmary. Within two hours, there had been lawyer phone calls and a visit from a nutritionist and a doctor and more lawyers and Steve had been strapped to a bed in the infirmary with an IV in him while they argued about how much they needed to feed him.

He had lain in bed, staring at the white ceiling and felt powerless and helpless and sick and alone.

Tony had been the only one that they had allowed to visit him in the infirmary. SHOC couldn't really say no to the man who had brought Captain America in to their custody, who had helped set up the prison to hold a superhero. So, on the morning of the day after he’d been strapped to the bed, Tony had come in and stood next to him, arms folded across his chest.

"I'm sorry," he had said, like he hadn't said it a hundred times between the tarmac outside of New York and the conference room at Stark Tower and the last moment on the courthouse steps. He'd stared down at Steve with dark eyes. "I'm sorry. I should've realized."

"Not your fault," Steve had replied and his throat had hurt on even the simple words.

Tony had sat down, heavy like he was deeply tired, reached out and took Steve's hand, cuff and all. "We're gonna get you through this," he said. "And then you'll come home and everything will go back to normal."

"Tony," Steve has said and had felt deeply weary. "Things can't go back to the way they were."

After that, Steve now receives four meals a day, with a carefully prescribed amount of nutrients, designed to keep him functional, if not healthy. It wasn't pizza or Thai or cinnamon rolls, but Steve didn't complain. It was still better than what he'd eaten during the war, during the Depression - this is what he tells himself anyway. A quiet part of him that he pushes down says that this is indeed the worst food he has ever had.

Breakfast takes him thirty minutes. He carefully eats each spoonful of the oatmeal, bites the red apple down the core and carefully leaves behind the stem and the seeds. He drinks the orange juice in tiny sips between large bites of the protein bar, washing out the chalky taste.

Then he runs in place for two hours, dropping to the floor every ten minutes for a hundred push ups. He does sit ups then. And, then, pull ups using a thick bar above his door. Then more push ups. Then more running in place. Lunges. Squats.

His second meal comes and he eats it just as methodically as the first. A banana, two runny eggs cracked over two pieces of bland toast, another protein bar, and a carton of milk.

He relieves himself and showers again and then lays down on his bed.

Only 18 hours to go.

 

* * *

 

People would remember the sunset, later, as unaccountably beautiful.

From Australia to Hawaii, people took pictures and commented on the vibrant colors as the sun sunk into the west, resplendent in golds and pinks and purples and reds.

Then the last beams faded and the stars and moon appeared, unwavering and steadfast as always.

In Australia, the sun came up. In Asia, the sun came up. In Africa, the sun came up. In Europe, the sun came up.

But, that day, the sun didn't rise over the Atlantic Ocean. It didn't rise over New York or Vancouver or Los Angeles or Calgary or Buenos Aires. The sky was clear and the stars shone brightly - but the sun did not come.

An invisible shadow seemed to rest over almost half the globe.

Standing on the bluffs of Ireland, in the bright of day, people could see an ominous darkness hovering just 50 miles off the coast, the mouth of a great cave yawning.

Confusion turned to fear turned to panic. Schools closed. Businesses stayed shuttered. Lines at gas stations and supermarkets lengthened.

Then the video message came, interrupting a press conference from the White House, a plea for calm.

"Humanity," said a silhouette standing before a scarlet background, tentacles looming large and black. "We have stolen your sun. Do not be alarmed. We can bring it back. All we ask in payment is the delivery of one of your prisoners, rotting away in a dark cell and of no use to you anymore. Give us the man you once knew as Captain America and you will have your sun. We have sent instructions. You have 48 hours."


	3. Chapter 3

Steve first knows something is wrong when his yard time is cancelled.

Of course, calling it yard time is being exceedingly generous. The yard is nothing more than a large concrete hole in the ground. Steve can pace its perimeter in 64 steps. If he wanted to, he probably could clear the entire length in a single jump. There are no flowers or grass or trees - just spidery cracks stretching across the bottom and the occasional smell of sewage. Sometimes, though, the sun is shining and Steve just lays in the center with his eyes closed and sucks in the warmth. He gets an hour there. Sometimes, it all feels so pathetic he can barely breathe.

Nonetheless, routine has an out sized importance in his life. It's one of few things that keeps him sane.

Now, ten minutes before yard time, he's sitting, cross legged on his bunk, reading some romance novel that Tony had sent him as a joke.

Since he’d arrived in this tiny cell, Tony has sent him a new crate of paperbacks every four weeks. Steve was never sure how much was personally hand picked by Tony himself, how much was stripped from whatever the recent Best Sellers or award long list had just come out, and how much was just random assistants throwing stuff in a box. Either way, Steve always appreciated the box. There were two long shelves in his cell and both were stacked tightly with books.

This one, though, he’s pretty sure is supposed a joke. It’s a historical bodice-ripper romance, the US during the Revolutionary War. The cover features a mousey, slender blonde female heroine, wrapped in a flag, with a shirtless brown haired soldier standing behind her. The soldier is clutching a rifle in his hands and his hair is long and blowing in the wind, just caught by the fading sunset. His name, Steve had learned from reading the back cover, is James. So it's probably a joke - but he's reading it anyway. This is part of his routine. One hour of reading, right after a thirty minute nap following his second meal. He reads again for one hour after his last shower of the day and before the lights go off for the perfunctory five hours.

He reaches the part where James is tenderly undoing the ties to Abigail's dressing gown, when the clock gently ticks over to 2:30. Carefully, he takes the strip of paper he uses as a bookmark and slides it in place, closes the book, and then sets it on his bedside table.

The guards come between 2:30 and 2:40 every day, depending on their work load with other prisoners. Steve doesn't like the variation: he doesn't like these ten minutes where he has nothing planned and can plan nothing. He doesn't like the sensation of craning his ears toward the door, desperate to hear the faint footsteps and the first squeak and groan of the locks being undone.

First, the small delivery slot that they push his meals through will be opened and he'll be asked to put his wrists through. They'll fasten thick magnetized cuffs on his wrists. These chafe and grind the bones of his hands together, but he never complains.

Then, he will be instructed to move away from the door to the opposite side of the room and lay flat, cuffed hands awkwardly stretched above his head. Only after that will the guards come in, guns and tasers at the ready despite months and months and months of passive compliance.

His feet will be shackled and a hood will be slid over his head. They'll stand him up, then, and attach a thick length of chain between the cuffs and the shackles. Two men will take each arm and guide him into the narrow world beyond his cell. He makes sure to stay pliable, head down and shoulders relaxed. Even after all this time, he can sense the nerves of the guards. It’s not entirely unjustified - Steve doesn’t think he could get the mag cuffs off - but he’s pretty sure he could break the ankle shackles, and that would be enough.

The journey from his cell to the yard would take anywhere from six minutes to fifteen minutes through windy, silent corridors - Steve's pretty sure they change their route frequently to keep him confused about the layout. Even with that though, he's typically in the yard by three pm.

Now, he stretches against the bed, and then the wall, pulling his arms over his head and then folding in half so that his back pulls pleasantly. He tries not to look at the clock.

When 2:40 ticks around and no one has come, he feels a nervous itch in the small of his back. He paces the cell once, a tight circle that makes him feel even more like a rat in a cage. He washes his face, scrubs his hands, tugs at the already perfect blanket on his bed.

When three pm comes and he's still alone in his cell and the hallway remains silent, he can’t stop the panic from welling in his gut. He clenches his fists and forces himself not to pound on the door, to test his strength against the thick metal for the first time. He imagines that the entire world has ended and, somehow, impossibly, only this small cell survived. No one will ever come for him. He will be forgotten. His chest feels tight.

No one comes.

Steve forces himself to lay back down on his bed, forces himself to relax and tense every muscle, starting at his toes and working up. He jogs in place. He drinks water. He tries to read but the words blur together.

Finally, at six pm, he hears footsteps. He vaults off his bed and ends up at the cell door, hands pressed to the steel. The slot opens and a covered tray with his third meal of the day is shoved through. The slot closes.

"Wait," he shouts, bangs his hands on the door once. "Wait! What's going on?"

The footsteps clatter down the hall and Steve is alone once more.

 

* * *

 

Tony sits in the same conference room where he had helped Steve Rogers draw up and notarize his terms of surrender and feels utterly at a loss. Rhodey is next to him and there’s a whole line of government officials across the table and on the video screens around the room.

That day, Steve had sat with his back to the windows and his hands had been steady. He had been calm, if tired, self-assured and centered in a way that Tony had always envied. He'd never raised his voice, not when the lawyers from the government had goaded him, and he'd laid his demands out clearly with no wavering. The lawyers had huffed and called their bosses and within the hour, Captain America had been signing away his rank, his shield, his job, his freedom. He had stood and handed over his shield, hands flitting briefly over the curve of it before he had let it go.

Hours later, after the courthouse and the press conference and more signatures and more meetings, someone had poured Tony a glass of champagne and Tony had thrown it against the wall.

"You can't hand him over," he says, now. "Whatever happened to not negotiating with terrorists." He doesn't say it as a question. He knows what happened.

It's almost sunset on the day the sun never came up. The full length windows provide a clear view of Manhattan, covered in an eerie, unnatural blackness. There should be sunlight. It should be the middle of the day. But, instead, there are still stars. The darkness feels murky, somehow, not like the clean black of night. This is heavy and oppressive and wrong on a deep cellular level.

There's four representatives from SHOC, two army generals and a guy from the UN and a bevy of worker bees fluttering behind them. It must be serious if they flew down here to see him rather than just getting on a video conference.

As it is, there are two senators, the chair of SHOC, and the Secretary of State on the video screens.

"Mr. Stark," one says now. "You're not appreciating the gravity of the situation. Without the sun, crops will die. Our economy will collapse."

Outside, Tony can see the bright man-made lights shining against a dark sky, pinpoints of light that don't make any difference at all. He shivers. "We've had less than 24 hours! You need to give us more time. I have the best people working on this," Tony takes a deep breath. "He's still a war hero. He's still Captain America. You can strip him of his rank and his shield but he's still going to be who he is. You can't give him up. Not to his enemies."

"Public opinion polls show that a majority support this as a solution,” says one of the senators.

"And so you're just going to keep screwing him over to save your own asses. Wasn't this the same bullshit line you fed me when you added ten years to his sentence? That the American public was still afraid? That more time needed to pass before Steve could re-enter the world? The way you've treated him has been a disgrace. All of you know that he's innocent of everything."

"Steve Rogers confessed to conspiracy..."

Tony doesn't want to hear this again - doesn't want to hear how Steve had signed on a dotted line to make himself a criminal. He tries another tactic. "What about the serum? We don't want them getting ahold of that, right?"

"Hydra had all of Rogers' medical information and samples when he worked for SHIELD. Not to mention all their work on Barnes. I doubt they'll be able to crack the super soldier formula any time soon." It's one of the generals, the only one that looks the least bit remorseful. "If there was another way, we'd take it. But our backs are against a wall and this is the only way out."

"So you'd give up a man who has sacrificed everything for us. To the people who hate him most in the whole world." Tony pauses. "You know, if he's lucky, they'll kill him. He probably won't get lucky though. Do you really want to condemn a man to that?"

"We won't force him," the Secretary cuts in, saying it smugly like giving Steve a choice makes any of this better at all. "We'll simply present the decision to him. If he says no, we may have to make different arrangements."

"He won't say no," Tony says. "You know that. Because whatever you people have put him through, he's still a better man than you."

"Us, Mr. Stark? You were the one who brought Rogers in, ultimately. Don't forget that."

"And I never will. This is your perfect chance to get rid of him, isn't it? No more Captain America sitting in jail. He can die a hero and you can be heroes for sending him to his death." He stares at all of them and they all look back, silent and with no denial.

They think this is the easy way out, an easy ransom to pay. Tony remembers how glad they were to pin everything on Steve back in the day - now they've found a way to get rid of him for good. There's no way around this - they're just going to have to deal with this as best they can.

Tony sighs and turns to look at Rhodey.

Rhodey nods.

He turns back. "I'll fly out and talk him. Today. I trust one of you people will inform the prison? And get us a real meeting room. None of this glass wall nonsense. And," he claps his hands on the table and leans forward, stares down the men. "We're going to work out a new deal. He does this and his prison sentence get commuted. He's a free man. Full Presidential pardon and you call him Captain America again. None of this 'oh here's a new crime, let's tack on another 10 years' you people have been pulling on him. Okay? I get that in writing that he does this as Captain America or nothing. You hear me?"

The Secretary nods, tightly. "That can be arranged."

Tony laughs bitterly at the easy acquiesce. "Yeah, because you people all know he's not going to be coming back." Tony gets up and leaves, feels Rhodey follow and the rest of them watch him.

"You're really going to tell him?" Rhodey says quietly, once they're in the hallway, the door shutting behind them with a solid thud. "You know he'll go. You know what they'll do."

"If I don't tell him, they will. It'll be better coming from me." Tony hits the button for the elevator. "I'm gonna take a suit to Colorado. Follow in the quinjet? Bring Barnes and Natasha."

"You're going to make me handle telling Barnes what's going down?"

Tony pats him on the shoulder. “Sorry, not it. Try to be faster next time.”

 

* * *

 

Rhodes tells Barnes first - before any of the others. It’s only right. Rhodey brings him outside the command room where they’ve all been set up to deal with tracking the video, setting up command posts, and coordinating the research on what sort of device could block out the sun from the Western Hemisphere.

The whole team is weary, cups of coffee half full amid stacks of papers.

The sun is where it used to be - it’s just not shining on them. They can track it's normal course from the sky. The space station can still see the sun, brilliant as always. But, something is happening in the lower atmosphere that neutralizes the sunlight, absorbs it, so no light reaches the ground.

The whole team had all seen the video demanding Captain America's surrender just hours before. Barnes had watched the recording and no one had mentioned that he had bent the back of the chair he had been clutching. They had all been quietly grateful, for the first time in two years, that Steve was behind bars, safe in a maximum security prison. They should've known.

Now, Barnes is in the modified Captain America outfit that Tony had designed almost a year ago, dark gray with the star on his chest and his metal arm bare in the fluorescents, sitting at a smaller table near the bank of computers. He sees Rhodey coming and his face hardens. He stands up from the table, passes his tablet off to Natasha and beckons Rhodey to follow him out of the room.

They walk outside where the outdoors floodlights are on and the sky is wide and huge and dark and Rhodey tells him about the deal.

Barnes punches a tree, the sound like a small explosion. He makes an fist-sized crater, splinters flying and bark raining down. The tree makes a shuddery cracking noise and the night falls silent. Barnes hunches his shoulders, breathing in deep gulps. “He’s going to say yes. He’s going to give himself up."

“Tony is going to set up all the precautions we can. We’ll get a tracker on him. Get planes in the area and snipers and…”

“None of that will matter,” Barnes says to the ground. “They’ll know. They’ll know we’ll put a tracker on him. That we’ll have planes in the air and snipers. They’ll know. They’ll either put a bullet in his brain right away or…” his voice catches. “Or they’ll do something to him and it won’t matter how fast we get him back.” When he looks up, meets Rhodey's gaze, he's dry eyed and his mouth is pale. "How long do we have?"

"They gave us 36 hours in the video. We have 33 left." Rhodey hesitates. "When this happens, they're going to pardon him of all crimes. They're going to reinstate him as an Avenger."

"So he'll have a nice gravestone at Arlington for me to visit." Barnes breathes deep. His hand drifts toward his pocket, to where his phone sits with the constant stream of Steve living in an 8x10 cell. "Tony already on his way?"

"He took a suit to Colorado. Said you and Romanov should follow in the quinjet as soon as you can. I'm sorry," Rhodey offers, even though it feels like it’s never enough. "None of us wanted it to turn out this way. Any of this." In the beginning, Tony had been confident that this was the best way. Steve would be out in a year, maybe two. He’d go away for awhile. And then come back. And the government would forget their vow to keep him out of the Avengers and they’d give his shield back and Steve would have just had a nice little rest for a few months.

It hadn’t worked out that way.

Barnes curls his hand. "I know. I know. It doesn't make it any better though."

Rhodey remembers the conference room in New York and Steve's quiet resolve in the face of prison and loss of everything he knew. "He's the best man I know," he says, quietly. "The strongest. If anyone can come out on top of this, it'll be him."

 

* * *

 

Steve is already in the visiting room when Stark arrives. He's cuffed to the table at his hands and feet and his shoulders are bent low when Tony comes in.

His head shoots up and he makes to stand, seeming to remember the restraints at the last second. His eyes are so bright in his face, skin and hair washed in the gray room. "Tony," he says, voice thin. "They won't tell me anything. What happened? Is it Bucky?"

He's afraid, Tony realizes. Steve's mouth is thin and tight and Tony hadn't considered what Steve would think. He hadn't thought how it would feel to be hustled suddenly from the small cell that had become his world, to break the careful routine that Steve rigorously kept to, and bring him to the first new room he's seen in months and months. Since the infirmary.

"Bucky's fine," he reassures quickly and Steve droops in relief. Guiltily, he wonders how many worst case scenarios Steve had thought of before he had arrived. He sits down across from Steve, seeing him up close, with no glass between them, for the first time since those awful days when Steve was strapped to a hospital bed, skin sticking to his skull like he was wasting away.

Steve licks his lips and leans forward as best he can. "What then?"

"Hydra." Tony watches Steve flinch at the word, feels the answering flinch in his own bones. “Okay. I have to do this fast. They're blocking the sun. From the entire Western Hemisphere. We haven't had daylight in, oh," he checks his watch. "A little over 24 hours. Since sundown, yesterday. No, we don’t know how. But it’s bad. We’re looking at massive impacts on wild life, food supply, the energy grid. Not to mention mass hysteria. Not everyone is ready to be nocturnal. ”

Steve is already nodding. “What can I do? You can see that I'm a little tied up." He smiles at his own joke, like this actually something to laugh about.

"Hydra wants you. They say they'll give us the sun back if we give them you. And, no, I don’t trust them. But the public, the government, they think it’s our best shot.”

Steve's face is pulled tight and he doesn’t say a word.

"You don't have to do this, Steve. Not at all. I have lawyers working on the additional charges and they think there's a good chance they can get you out of here in another 18 months. Two years, tops. Then you can come home. No one will force you to do this."

I won't let them, Tony adds silently.

"I'm working on a solution," he goes on to fill the silence as Steve stares sightlessly at the table. "We don't have anything yet. I won't lie to you. But we will. This is just science. Not magic. You can pass on this one."

"You know I can't just sit by.” Steve's voice is quiet. He doesn't continue for a long moment, letting the silence lengthen. "I've let enough people die already for my selfishness. How many people will this hurt if I don't?"

"None of that was your fault."

"That's not what you said back then."

"I was angry back then. You know that."

"You were angry and you were right. I don't regret anything that happened. But you were right."

"Even if I was, you still don't owe anyone another thing. You've been sitting in this hell hole for over two years. The people who want you to save them now are the same ones that put you here. You don't owe them."

Steve's eyes are soft, still kind despite it all. "Tony. I'm not helping anyone in here. You and the team have been doing a great job. But I'm useless. And even if I get out of here, they'll never give me shield back. I'll never be able to save anyone again. This - this would at least mean something."

"It means you dead. If you're lucky. Have you thought about what they'll do to you?" He's being cruel and he knows it as the words come out of his mouth, hates the flash of uncertainty that crosses Steve's face.

But Steve's jaw tightens just a second later. "I'm not going to change my mind, Tony. How long will it take to make the arrangements?"

Tony presses on. “And what about Bucky? Have you thought about what this is going to do to him?" It's the last play, the last shot in the arsenal against Steve's iron will.

It lands. Steve's face crumples a little, mouth twisting around like there's something deep inside bursting out. "Tony... You'll take care of him? You and the team? He's been doing so well. Sam and Natasha and Wanda have been telling me. He's a good man, Tony."

Tony remembers those last moments before the courthouse, in a dark SUV with Steve hunched beside him, seeming small for the first time since Tony had known him.

"Take care of him," he had told Tony, desperate and focused even then. "You have to promise me. He has to be okay. All this is meaningless if..."

"I'll take care of him," Tony had promised, moments from watching Steve be taken away. "He won't want for anything. He'll be safe."

"And you'll see that he gets my shield? I don't have much but I want him to have..."

"I'll do it, Steve. He'll have your shield."

Now, months later, in a dark prison, he nods, makes the promises again. He’ll make the promise as many times as he needs to if it brings Steve any comfort. ”You know I will, Steve." He hesitates. "He's coming now. On the quinjet. I'm going to be handling your transport to the drop. You'll have the marshals from SHOC with you, of course. But he'll be there. Natasha too."

Steve struggles and his voice is hoarse when he says, "thank you."

"I got them to sign your pardon. You do this, the instant you're in their hands, all your crimes are pardoned by the President and the rest of your sentence is commuted. Your rank is restored. You'll be Captain America." The promise feels empty. "The drop is in Greenland. Thirty-two hours from now. We'll go to New York. Get a tracker on you. We won't leave you there with Hydra, Steve. As soon as we can, we're coming after you. We'll get you back. Bring you home. And you're Captain America again."

"So all I have to do is survive Hydra and I'll get my shield back? Sounds like a plan." Steve is wry and grim but he manages a smile that, impossibly, makes Tony feel a better.

He smiles back. ”Well, you haven't died yet. Just keep that up and you'll be home with Barnes before you know it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to all of you from your kind comments and feedback! I really appreciate it and I hope you are all continuing to enjoy!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warning: there's brief, consensual blow job between adults at the end of this chapter.

Two marshals, especially sent by SHOC, escort Steve from the caravan of armored trucks to where the quinjet is waiting on the small airport's tarmac in Colorado.

It's pitch black, the only light coming from the yellow lamps at the runway and a bright wedge of moon. It's real night now.

Steve is cuffed and hobbled, a deputy holding each arm at the elbow. He's still in prison gray but Natasha realizes that this is the first time she's seen him outside in over two years.

Natasha watches him, walking ungracefully with the heavy cuffs on each ankle and arms secured in front of him, and tries not to think how easy it would be to take out the marshals. She had watched them wind toward the airport, four dark armored transport trucks in a perfect uniform, and dreamt of how she would take the drivers out first. And then the guards. Steve had been in the third one. It would've been so simple to blow the tires out on the other three, get away with the fourth in the confusion.

Instead, she meets them halfway from the trucks, hands up a little like she's unarmed.

"Good to see you, Steve." She purposely does not look at the marshals, studies him instead.

The dim lighting is washing him out, making him paler and thinner than even she had expected. He looks tired, she thinks. Weary to the bone.

But Steve isn't looking at her.

His gaze is over her shoulder and she knows who is there without turning to look.

Footsteps stop right beside her and Bucky Barnes swallows. "Steve."

Steve folds forward without a sound, proving the pointlessness of the marshals when he easily shakes them off without any discernible strain. He can't lift his arms with the magcuffs, but it doesn't matter because Barnes catches him easily about the shoulders, pulls him close and cradles his head into his shoulder like Steve is just half the size he is now.

They stand like that, half in moonlight and half in shadow, curled together like two puzzle pieces. Shiny and dull. Dark and light. Chained and free.

Barnes has his metal hand in Steve's hair and his flesh hand around his back. He's staring up at the sky, eyes dry and distant.

Steve's shoulders are jerking up and down, like he's taking in great gulps of air after going miles and miles without rest, even as his face stays pressed into the side of Barnes's neck.

The marshals are shifting restlessly, torn between their duty and the knowledge that they won't be able to pry Steve and Barnes apart even if they tried. Not unless the two men let them. And that didn't seem to be happening any time soon.

As if Bucky can hear their indecision, his face sharpens and his eyes narrow on the two men standing behind Steve. Natasha could swear that his teeth bare a little.

"Gentleman," she interjects, "would you like to put your gear in the quinjet? I'm sure you're aware of our tight schedule."

There’s just under remaining 28 hours until Steve has to be delivered to the coordinates in Greenland.

She helps the marshals store their gear and shows them to their bunks, a small room off of the main body of the aircraft. It’s out of the way so Steve doesn’t have to see them. She watches them look around, hands on their holsters, and stands in the door way with folded arms.

"Mr. Stark has arranged with SHOC and the US Attorney for Steve to be officially placed under the custody of the Avengers. You're here to monitor the situation and report back to ensure the terms of Captain Rogers' release are being followed. Please let us know if we can do anything to make your stay more comfortable." She smiles a shark smile.

He is not yours, she wants to say. He is ours. If he asked me to kill you both and take him to a tropical island to spend the rest of his life, I would gladly. You are alive because he allows it.

They don't look cowed. They're both big men, broad shouldered, and move with the competence of the highly trained. But she can see that they know that they're no match for the Avengers in a close quarters. If Steve said the word, there wouldn’t be much they could do.

"We're all on the same team here," one of them says to her back as she turns to go, leaving them to set up their gear. He doesn’t sound angry, just stiff and formal, like he’s not enjoying this either.

She doesn't turn around, doesn’t absolve him of the part he is playing in all of this. None of them will find absolution for this, not in this life or the next, she’s sure of it. "We're getting Rogers safely to the drop point," she says, proud how flat her tone is. "We have a common goal. But we are not on the same team."

 

* * *

 

The magcuffs won't come off Steve's arms.

Bucky curses and then immediately gentles his hands over Steve's shoulders when the other man flinches sharply at the abrupt noise.

Steve's wide eyed and quiet, content to sit on the low bench Bucky pushed him on. He seems dazed, overwhelmed, even in the relative quiet darkness of the quinjet.

"Sorry," he had said when Bucky had gotten him back upright on both feet after their meeting outside the quinjet. "Sorry. I just. It's been a long time." He hadn’t been able to hold Bucky so Bucky had kept his grip tight, pulling him toward the quinjet, supporting his halting steps.

Back when Bucky had believed Steve would be coming home in 36 months (and then 32 months, 28 months, 24 months, 20 months, and every day had been a countdown), he'd spent whatever time he had (when he wasn't watching Steve in his cell or trying to be Captain America for the Avengers or in therapy to get his own head screwed back on straight) preparing for Steve to come home.

There is an apartment in Brooklyn, neatly furnished, with a safe room and clear sight lines and long bookshelves and an easel in one corner and soft chairs and bright light from wide windows. There is a cabin near the Avengers facility, close enough to be protected but far away enough that Steve could feel alone and unwatched, with a large sunken tub and an even bigger bed and drawing supplies carefully tucked into drawers. And, the one that no one knows about (not even Sam or Natasha), a house in a tiny town on the Oregon coast with its own beach and a wood burning stove and a bedroom with a view of an ocean that went on forever.

Bucky had understood it wasn’t going to easy or simple - he’d known Steve wasn’t just going to be able to step back into the Avengers facility like nothing had happened. He'd read books and articles and had got Sam to put him in touch with experts on working with prisoners coming out of solitary confinement and reintegrating them with the world. He wanted to be ready - he wanted to make sure that whatever Steve needed, he could provide.

Vaguely, he had known that this had all happened to him too - that, in the beginning, Hydra had kept him in a tiny room, alone with no hope of escape. And he hadn't had a shower or a toilet or the carefully portioned meals or even the thin mattress that Steve has. He's seen Hydra’s papers about him, the carefully annotated science logs about the "the subject." He knows it happened.

The reality, though, is that the memory is blurry, indistinct and smudged over by years of electricity and damage. It doesn't feel like it happened to him, doesn't feel real. It feels like a dream or a movie or a scar covered over with age.

In the now though, Bucky is more likely to wake up, sweating, from dreams of running through a giant prison. In the dreams, he can hear Steve calling his name and he throws open all the doors, but Steve is still trapped. He wakes up to the empty bed and an empty room and turns on the surveillance stream from Steve’s cell, watches him sleep until he can drift off again.

Those dreams feel more real than what had happened to him over 70 years ago.

"I want to remember," he had told Sam once. "I want to remember how I felt. Then I could help Steve better. I would know what he needs. Will need. When he’s back.”

"You feel guilty that you can't remember," Sam had said in that knowing way of his, even though he wasn't actually Bucky's therapist. “You feel guilty that you forgot all of this and Steve never will.”

The books, the experts, the papers had all said Steve would be feeling overwhelmed when he was released. He'd need quiet and calm and a slow introduction back in to the normal pace of society. They said he could have trouble initiating behavior or making choices or interacting with others. They said he could go into sensory overload. They said he could hallucinate or disassociate.

So Bucky had a whole plan. A quiet space for Steve and him. He'd make potatoes and steak and apple pie and get warm blankets for Steve to wrap himself in and they'd watch quiet movies about happy things and Steve would draw and Bucky would hold him. Sam and Natasha would come. And Wanda and Tony. And all of Steve's friends. And Steve would recover. There had been a plan.

Then, the US government had tried to score political points by extending Steve's sentence. And, then, all of this.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry," Bucky murmurs. He rubs the bunched skin right on the edge of the magcuffs. "I'm sorry it's all turning out this way."

"It's okay, Buck." Steve leans, lets his forehead rest against Bucky's. "I'm glad they let you come."

Steve is too thin. Bucky had seen it in the footage - but, seeing it in front of him, is a whole new revelation. Skin stretched over bone and muscle, pulled tight like it's seconds from splitting or tearing open. He's pale, lips thin and white in a shrunken face. His hair is lank and brittle underneath Bucky's hand.

It feels like a memory, though Bucky can't know if it's real. Memories, even the good ones from before the war, are shaky, blurry things, supplemented with history books and stories. The best of human memories are fallible and Bucky's memory has been through more than most.

Just like his memories of isolation are thick blurs, a childhood spent with Steve is formless and soundless.

But he remembers Steve in his bones, remembers him like muscle memory or reflex or the way his lungs work. They’re not even memories, really; they are the most important impressions in his soul, the things he needs to make his body function and his life move forward, protect those vital bits of himself from harm. He could no more forget Steve Rogers wholly than he could forget that blood pumps through his veins.

So this, the fear in his gut and the instinct to comfort and save and hold, it doesn't matter if this is an impression or something he's actually remembering or just the oldest bit of muscle memory he has. It doesn't feel any less real.

"They couldn't have kept me away, Rogers." He fumbles at the magcuffs again, tugs at the thick latch. "Now I just need to find a key and we'll be all set."

"One of the marshals has it. The ones you scared away."

"I didn't scare them away."

Steve has his eyes closed and he's smiling, closed mouth but warm. "Yeah, you did, Buck,” he says it’s soft, like he’s half talking to a memory.

“This key?” Natasha drops next to Steve. “They didn’t even notice it was missing.”

Steve frowns at her.

Bucky can almost see him gathering his strength, straightening his shoulders, setting his jaw. Steve’s putting on the front that makes him Captain America, being strong and righteous for his team. Bucky wishes that the sight didn’t make his own anxiety calm a little. He knows it’s not real - but it makes him feel warm to see that Steve still has the strength to pretend.

“Natasha, we’re supposed to be working with them. They’re on our side. They’re just doing their job.” But Steve still offers his arms.

“Don’t worry. I’ll put it back. We’ll just tell them we had an extra.” She turns the key, releasing the magnetization field.

Steve groans as the cuffs come off, flexing his elbows. The skin is wrinkled and raw looking, white splotched with the pressure of the cuffs. “So, how long do we have?”

Bucky checks his watch. “Twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes.”

“Let’s get this show on the road then.”

 

* * *

 

At the tower, Sam is the one who greets them. Rhodey is off making sure the pardon for Steve is being signed, sealed, and delivered. Wanda and Vision and stayed at HQ to continue coordinating the research. Dr. Cho is in Seoul working on ways to use artificial sunlight on a mass scale. Clint is in Chicago, tracking down a Hydra lead. Sharon was in DC. Scott was with his daughter. Fury was maybe somewhere in Europe or Asia.

And that had left Sam to get the tower ready for the imminent arrival.

All of them had sent messages. All of them had wanted to know if there was something, anything, they could do to make any of this better. But there was nothing.

So Sam had decided (and everyone else had listened because Sam was just as fucked up as all of them but he actually had experience with this) that too many people would overwhelm Steve.

If this was an actual homecoming, they could've brought everyone in and spaced out a get together over days or weeks. They could've done dinners on the roof or walks in the park or sparring sessions. They would've played pool and cracked bottles of wine and made cakes.

This is not a homecoming.

They have 16 hours before they need to be wheel's up and headed to Greenland. Greenland - one of the countries that’s blanketed by darkness.

Where Steve is going to be handed over to Hydra in exchange for hopefully, maybe, getting the sunlight back.

So Steve is coming here first.

Ostensibly, he will be signing the agreement from the US Government that reinstates him as Captain America and another that states he's being turned over to Hydra of his own free will - and that the government is not liable for any emotional, mental, or physical harm that could be incurred. He'll be receiving a sub dermal tracking chip from Tony (they have no expectations it will stay in his body long term - but they're hoping it will be long enough to track him down). He'll be getting briefed on the situation and outfitted in something warm and somewhat protective.

In reality, Sam thinks that this is like the last day before execution. This is the last day of visiting with family members. This is the chef that comes in to make all your favorite foods. These are the last requests.

Steve is coming home, one last time, to say goodbye.

He had been viciously, completely, and blindingly angry when they had told him what was going on. What they were going to ask Steve to do.

"He's not going to say no," he had shouted at Bucky while the man had packed quickly for Colorado. "He wouldn't have said no before and he's not going to say no after being locked away in a cell for two years. You've done the reading. You know what it's done to him. He can't make this decision now. You can't put it on him."

Bucky had been grim. "We don't have a choice."

"You know you're sending him to die?"

In the dim light, Bucky's shoulders had slumped. "We don't have a choice," he repeats. "If we didn't do it this way, they'd just drag Steve from his cell and cart him over there in handcuffs and throw him on their doorstep. Is that what you want?"

"We could run. We could take him and go." The words had popped, loud and sharp, out before Sam could stop them and he and Bucky both stiffened in the silence that followed.

Sam had never talked overtly of breaking Steve out. He had known it was something that Natasha and Bucky held in the back of their minds - but he had never encouraged it himself. He'd had faith, misguided now, that things would somehow return to normal if they just followed the rules.

He had paused, gathering himself. "We could run," he had said, softer. "There's nothing left."

Bucky's face had twisted sharply before he had clenched his fists, the metal one whirring. "If that's what he wants, we'll do it. But you know he won't want that." And then he had left.

Sam has seen Steve at least once a month since his incarceration. Sometimes more if the fifth visit per month wasn’t filled by someone else. He had thought he was ready to see Steve, now, on this last day. He'd even talked with Bucky before the quinjet had flown out to Colorado. He’d been trying to prepare Bucky, trying to tell him that Steve would be thin and pale and run down - not the Captain America he’d been when he’d walked into the courthouse.

He’d been so focused on getting Bucky ready, he hadn’t realized how unprepared he was.

It shakes him to his core when he sees Steve step off the quinjet. Nat and Bucky are on his either side; Tony is just behind; and the two marshals follow just after him.

Steve had changed out of the prison jumpsuit that had been his primary garb the last months. He's in a bulky dark gray sweatshirt and dark jeans. Somehow the civilian clothes make him seem gaunter, paler. His eyes are clear though, and when he hugs Sam, it's firm and warm and strong.

"Thanks for being here, Sam," he says.

"Wouldn't be anywhere else, Cap." He grips back. He wants to hold on, wants to keep Steve here and make him stay.

He wants to tell him that they're all putting on brave face. But they're not okay. They won't be okay if Steve steps into Hydra's hands and they immediately put a bullet into his head. They won't be okay even if Steve isn't executed immediately - if Steve is taken far away and they have to hunt for him like they hunted for Bucky not that long ago. They won’t be okay when they find him and he’s just a shell, or if he’s tortured to the bone, or if his brain is burned to blankness.

But Sam can’t say any of that - not when Steve is fragile in his arms.

“Let’s get you some food,” he says instead, speaks to Bucky and Natasha. “A shower. Some sleep maybe?”

Bucky nods. He looks okay at least. Better than Sam had expected him to look. The months had been long on Bucky, edging away at him like a deep disease.

“No time.” Steve pulls back, wipes a hand over his face. “Greenland in 16 hours.”

"You have time for food at least," Sam shoots a look at Bucky and the other man touches Steve's elbow.

"Go eat something with Sam, I have some things to work out with Natasha but I won't be long." Bucky's voice is gentler than Sam's ever heard it, low and quiet and soothing. Sam is used to gruffness and silences and short sentences - not this tenderness that bleeds across the small space. His own chest aches a little.

Steve nods, swaying just a little. His easy acquiesce feels painful too - Sam thinks that the Steve from before would've never been okay with accepting orders that easily.

In the kitchen, Steve sits quietly while Sam pulls out the thick soups that they had ordered to the Tower. Steve's diet had been so limited the past months that they needed to keep with bland, easy foods.

Between Sam and Bucky, Sam's pretty sure they've read enough books and talked to enough experts about how to reintegrate solitary confinement prisoners with the freedom. Hell, they could both write a doctoral thesis on the subject if they that had been their goal.

Sam checks his watch. He can't cram all his reading into the hours they have left - but he can at least make sure Steve is comfortable for this.

"Sam, I need to ask you something." Steve's low voice interrupts him and he turns from the counter.

"Yeah, of course."

Steve looks worn and washed out. His hands are limp on the table, like he's too tired to raise his arms. When Sam sets the bowl of soup down, the left side of his mouth tugs up but he doesn't move otherwise. "You've been real good to me, Sam. When I was in there. You took care of Bucky and you made me feel," Steve struggles for a moment, "like things weren't so bad."

"It was my pleasure, Cap."

Steve flinches just a little at the title and Sam bites his inner mouth.

"Steve," he corrects himself.

"I need you to take care of them all," Steve says. "I know this is going to be hard on everyone. And I'm sorry for that. But it has to be done so I want to know they'll be okay."

None of them will be okay.

But, Sam says, "sure, Steve. I'll make sure," gently, anyway.

 

* * *

 

It would’ve never felt like enough time to say goodbye.

They have three hours before they have to leave and they’re in the lab. Bucky’s been regulated to standing in the back while Steve gets boosters and fancy tracking implants.

“Your body will push it out eventually,” Stark is saying as he waves a beeping little machine across Steve’s chest. “But I think we’ll have a couple weeks, maybe a month? Unless they cut it out. Don’t let them cut it out, Rogers.”

Steve smiles wanly. “I’ll fight them tooth and nail.”

Stark’s hand stutters across where he’s checking the signal from the implant. “You better,” he says, serious. “Don’t ever give up.”

They haven’t spent much time together, Bucky and Tony. In the beginning, it had been hard to even be in the same room, between Bucky’s fury at Steve’s arrest and Tony’s guilt at the same. But, tentative truces had been reached. Stark had showed up in Bucky’s quarters, eight weeks after Steve had been incarcerated and one week after Steve had gotten out of the infirmary, carrying a sleek looking phone.

“Here,” he had said, flipping the device down onto the desk. “The password is Cap’s birthday. You can change it to whatever. I hacked the security footage at Florence. You can switch between angles by swiping.”

Bucky had picked it up, turning it over. He plugged in 07-04 and then a white room had appeared. There was a bed in one corner, a shower and toilet and sink in the other, a low bench with books carefully stacked across, and a large steel door. Steve was on the floor, doing push ups. Bucky switched the volume and he could hear him counting.

“100, 101, 102, 103, 104.”

It had been the first time he’d seen Steve since the courthouse steps. He hadn't been able to see his face, just his broad back in a thin grayish t-shirt, the curve of one sharp cheekbone. His heart had started hurting.

Tony had cleared his throat. “He doesn’t know. We don’t have any way of telling them that doesn’t include informing the guards that we hacked his feed. But. I wanted to keep an eye on him.”

“That’s how you knew he wasn’t getting enough food.”

“Yep. I hacked it after our last visit. He was looking too thin.” Stark had looked down. “I’m sorry you can’t visit. That was never something I wanted.”

“I know.” Because Stark may have been many things, but he was never cruel.

“Now we both can keep an eye on him. Make sure they’re treating him right.”

“Thank you,” Bucky had looked down, at the desk, and then out the window at the grounds that Steve had helped designed, had called home. “I know,” he hesitated. “I know you didn’t plan this. That you didn’t want it to end like this.”

Stark had shrugged, purposefully careless and his eyes cutting to one side. “I still put him in there. I helped sign that deal.”

“And now you’re helping him again. I know Steve appreciates it too.”

That moment hadn’t fixed all their problems. But it had been a start. It had been something.

"This one," Stark is saying now, waving another wand over Steve's calf. "This won't activate until three days from now. In case they scan you to detect tracker signals. It won't show up because it won't be on. Once the signal goes up, I'll be able to pinpoint your location with in ten feet in just a few minutes.”

Three days is a long time, Bucky thinks.

They haven't talked about it. Not really. Steve's been asking after everyone else, purposely directing the conversation away from him and what's coming. Bucky's noticed. Sam's noticed. Natasha's noticed.

He doesn’t seem scared. He’s facing this like he’s faced everything in his life, Bucky thinks. Head on, shoulders back and jaw clenched.

In the first hour in the quinjet, those moments before takeoff when Steve had still been in prison garb and shackles, he'd seemed small. He had leaned into Bucky like he needed bolstering. But some time between Colorado and New York, he had tapped into that never ending reserve of strength and courage.

"You can still back out of this you know," Bucky says.

Stark freezes and Steve flinches, just a little. It's enough of an encouragement that Bucky keeps going.

"Stark said his people are getting close at finding something to counteract the barrier. You don't have to do this. We could run. No one would blame you."

Carefully, Stark sets down the wand and puts both hands on the table. "He's right, Cap. You could go. I can set up funds. They'd be untraceable. You... Any debt you owed after it all, it's fine. You've paid. You should go."

Steve is staring at the ground, broad shoulders pulled together. "Thanks, Tony. But you know I can't run."

What about me, Bucky wants to ask. What about me and our promises. How am I supposed to go on...

Steve looks at him then, helpless and lost.

Bucky leans close, puts Stark out of his mind, and kisses him hard. He licks at his mouth, tastes toothpaste and metal. "It'll be okay," he promises, and the lie is salty. "It'll all be okay."

When Stark's done, Bucky takes Steve back to his rooms. He shows him the view and the wide bed and the large kitchen, he pretends that Steve is coming back in just a few days.

"We'll grill steaks," he says, and Steve looks at him gratefully.

In the bedroom, Bucky takes out the shield, presents it to Steve like a crown. The room is dim, just lit by the hallway light and the open window showing the never ending darkness stretching over the city.

Steve strokes the curves, flips the weight in his palms like its an old beloved friend. "You'll take care of it, won't you?" he asks, thumbs bracketing the stripes. "Keep it safe for me."

"You could take it with you," Bucky says.

"No," Steve shakes his head. "No, this is a battle where I won't need a shield." He sets it back in its place, lets his hand rest once more on the side. "It's yours now anyway," he says. "Natasha keeps telling me how good you're getting with it."

In the strange, unnatural dark, he kisses Steve, breathes him in and memorizes the feel of his skin under his hands.

Steve's hair is a rough bristle under his fingertips and he rubs the curve of his scalp until Steve moans and leans against the wall. It's easy enough to pop the button on his jeans and scoot them down his narrow hips. The skin there is warm and soft and Bucky kneels on the bedroom rug and mouths at the hollow of Steve's thigh.

Above him, Steve inhales, sharp and clear, and Bucky blows a warm breath over his balls before taking Steve into his mouth. It's warm over his tongue, slightly salty, and he hollows his cheeks, pulling in until he feels the head nudge the back of his mouth. He rests his hands on Steve's hips, feels him tremble and hears the tiny noises that he's making.

It doesn't take long. Steve's hands fist in his hair and he says, "Bucky," once in warning before he comes, muffling the noise in his shoulder.

Bucky swallows and lets Steve soften in his mouth before pulling back.

Steve is looking down at him, eyes wide and pupils blown. His lower lip is red where he bit in and Bucky thinks he is the most lovely thing he has seen.

"I love you," he says, still on his knees, feeling like a worshiper. "I'll always love you."

Steve slides down the wall to the floor, takes his face in his hands. "I've dreamed of you my whole life," he says. "I've loved you every moment since I've known you."

Bucky leans forward so their foreheads rest together. "Come back to me," he whispers. "Just come back to me."

Steve's hands flex against him. "Bucky..."

"Just." Bucky stops, knowing it's unfair to to ask the promise like this. "It's okay," he says finally. "It'll be okay."

When Steve's lips touch his again, achingly gentle, Bucky feels his eyes burn. Here, after all this, Steve is the one comforting him.

"You'll be alright," Steve says to his mouth. "You're so strong, Buck." He kisses him hard then, breathing in so that Bucky feels the vacuum against his lips.

He fists his hands around Steve’s hips then and lifts, shifts him to the bed and lays them out together across the mattress. They have a couple hours left. They can make them count.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, thanks to everyone who's taken the time to comment or give kudos - it means a lot and I hope you continue to enjoy!


	5. Chapter 5

The coordinates that Hydra had sent are a flat plain of snow and ice, cold and unforgiving and bare. Thirty miles from the nearest base and a hundred from the nearest town.

They touch down thirty minutes before the hand off and Steve is quiet, staring out at the frozen desolation around him.

Around him are the two marshals from the SHOC, along with a more official liaison from SHOC as well, a representative from the Pentagon, and another from the UN. Tony is there. Natasha is there. Sam is there.

Bucky is a constant pressure against his side as they sit on a narrow bench next to a window, turned just a little so Steve can brace himself fully against his chest. He feels small in the position, cradled close and cherished. He does not move when he feels the wheels touch down and sees the floodlights flip on, savoring the moment where he doesn’t have to be brave. Bucky’s fingers tighten against his.

He'd been quiet for most of the flight over. They all had. In the beginning, there had been a bustle of sound and noise as people had worked out last contingencies and arrangements. But, as Greenland grew closer, all of them had grown quieter with the knowledge of what was coming. Steve had retreated here, to lean against Bucky and breathe steadily and remind himself that, whatever came, he'd still had this moment.

Out the window, everything is dark and snow and he feels the cold through the wall of the quinjet. He’s dressed like Captain America but the clothes feel ill fitting after months of nothing but loose, rough prison wear. The shoulders pull oddly over his chest and the belt had to be cinched in past the well worn notch of before. This suit used to fit like a glove and Steve remembers the feeling of security and strength and rightness that the suit had used to bring when he had put it on. The star across his chest and the red, white and blue across the middle. He had been proud.

Now he leans into Bucky like he is small and afraid. He is a pretender.

He thinks of his small cell and the gray walls and precise rhythm of days stretching into an endless blur of aching monotony and loneliness. He thinks of the way he could pace the walls and how he could, if he jumped, touch the ceiling with his fingers. He feels trapped now, too.

He'd had dreams in prison. Dreams of blue sky and the wind in his hair and Bucky's hands on his. He'd imagined his homecoming and his release in perfect vivid detail. It was a well-worn fantasy in the times when the lights were off and Steve was waiting for sleep.

In his head, he'd walk out the big metal doors and Bucky would be waiting, leaning against the side of the jeep, hair pulled back from his face but tendrils still flying free, and one leg bent like he had no worries. His hands would be in his jacket pockets and his shoulders would cast a broad shadow across the quiet road. The sun would be bright and hot and the Rocky Mountains would've been ringed around them and the wind would've been breezy, ruffling Buck's hair across his forehead. The air would smell like pine and dust and smoke. Bucky would have smiled when he saw Steve.

"Hey, soldier," he would've said, voice gruff with the years, and Steve would've dropped his bag and grabbed him and kissed him hard, uncaring about the cameras of the prison still pointed at him. He would’ve kissed him like in the movies, like in the books, like a fairy tale. He would've pressed himself full length against Bucky, felt him lean in, felt the warm slide of their lips and the way his nose pressed into Bucky's cheek. He'd imagined his fingers gripping the cotton t-shirt Bucky would be wearing, imagined Bucky's metal fingers curling and tugging at his belt loops until there was no space between them, no air. Then they'd get into the jeep. Bucky would start the engine and the road would blur beneath him and the prison would fade behind like ripples in a lake.

But Steve hadn't been released and this wasn't a dream. That dream was gone, it had never existed, really.

He makes himself remember why he is here. He thinks of an entire world in darkness, without light and without hope. Erskine had tapped his chest and told him to be a good man. This is what a good man would do. If this is the last thing Steve can do, if this is the last thing he's good for, he can do this. He knows what it's like to live in a world without being able to raise your face to the sun. His country will die - Steve would've died. So, he can do this last good thing.

Tony is talking and Steve wrenchingly tries to make himself listen.

"I can't pick up any heat signatures. No engines and no people. You'd think they be here by now. It's rude to be late..."

One of the suited men is frowning at his phone. "You didn't get the coordinates wrong?"

Tony starts, face twisting. "Did I what?" he says sharply and Steve wants to smile because it's so familiar.

But then he looks out the window, into the darkness, and he sees the red glow of lights approaching and his stomach twists. "They're here," he says and his voice is so quiet that only Bucky hears.

He feels Bucky tense, hears the slight click as a metal hand makes a fist.

"Stark," Bucky says but Steve isn't listening.

He straightens, plants his feet more firmly on the ground. He lets go of the sunlight in the Colorado mountains, of the miles of roads and Bucky's hand in his. He focuses, feels the cinch of his belt and the weight of his boots and the pull of armor at his shoulders. His lungs expand and he reaches for Captain America.

When he opens his eyes, he feels steadier. Fifteen minutes.

He stands and Bucky comes up with him. Everyone is looking at them, no one is moving.

"I'm not picking them up on the scanners," Tony says. "No warmth. No radio. Nothing. They're cloaking somehow. I'm trying to get around it now."

Steve suddenly misses his shield with a sharp and deep ache. He tries to imagine it back in New York, in Bucky’s bedroom, just waiting for its owner to pick it up. He’s not the owner anymore.

He nods and Stark puts down the back of the quinjet and the cold air streaks in.

The red lights are larger now, barely bobbing. He thinks he can see dark shapes below. Two men maybe? Had they walked?

They go out together. Steve and Bucky and Natasha and Tony and Sam. The marshals and the representatives. There's a camera on the quinjet and Tony flips it on as they leave. It's streaming back to Washington and the Tower and a hundred news networks. The world is watching. Steve wonders if they’re as scared as he is.

It's not snowing but the air feels heavy. It’s thick with something like expectation or dread.

The red glow has stopped now. Maybe 100 yards away and Steve knows he's supposed to walk to it. He’s almost glad for it - Bucky won’t be able to do anything stupid with him so far away. He won’t be able to see… whatever happens.

There's a clank to his left and Steve knows Tony has activated Iron Man.

His helmet is in his hand and he toys with it briefly before handing it to Sam. Their hands stay touching for a second longer and Steve leans into an embrace, feels Sam's coat and the pack of wings at his back.

"Take care of yourself," Sam tells him (like Steve is just walking away for awhile, like he’s going on a trip and he’ll get tan in the sun and come back) and Steve nods.

Natasha is next, her slim hands squeeze him tight and she smiles at him when they separate. "We'll get you back," she says.

He touches her cheek, once. “I’ve been honored to have you as a friend,” he tells her, because it needs to be said at least once. “Thank you for everything.”

She smiles at him and when they let go of each other, he thinks that she will be okay.

Tony flips up his visors and they lock eyes for a long moment. Steve thinks of conference rooms and quinjets and clashing with words and fists. He thinks of the last moments on the stairs and Tony gripping his hand in the infirmary and Tony promising to take care of Bucky. He thinks of Howard and Peggy and a flying car at a World Fair, stretching out beyond his wildest dreams and into this moment.

"It's been a ride," he says.

Tony laughs and Iron Man reaches out, taps his chest with one metal finger. "Don't let them take the trackers out. I'll be monitoring your vitals from here."

Steve nods to the marshals and the representatives. And then only Bucky is left.

Bucky is in his dark uniform, star across his chest and his hair pulled back. His metal arm is brassy in the quinjet’s floodlights and his eyes are washed to dullness.

He'll never see him again in sunlight, Steve thinks. He steps forward and feels Bucky pull him close. Their heads lean together and he closes his eyes.

The ice fades and they're in Brooklyn and Europe and the base in New York and the long, quiet road outside the prison. They're under blue skies and the whole of days is stretching before them. They're driving down a tree lined road and Bucky is laughing and the sun is hot on the top of his head like a blessing.

"I love you," Bucky says, here and now.

They kiss hard and Steve is back in the ice and Bucky tastes of salt. He breathes in shaky, the heat of Bucky's mouth sharp against the cold around him.

"I love you," he says when they pull back. Bucky's hand cups his jaw and Steve stares back, trying to fit a lifetime of watching Bucky's face into this single moment.

He pulls away and feels bereft.

Just behind the group, he can see the red light of the recording camera, where everyone back home is sitting in the dark, watching. He thinks of Wanda and Rhodey and Sharon and Clint. He thinks of the people, scared and longing for the sunlight just as he had in that cold prison. He brings his shoulders back and salutes, crisp and tight like he's back in Europe and Nazis are breathing down his neck.

"It's been an honor," he says, and he means it, down to the core of him. I will fix this for you, he wants to say. Don't be afraid, I will fix this for you. 

And then he turns.

The ice and snow is firmly packed so he doesn't struggle across the ground. It’s an easy walk.

The figures and the red glow resolve as he gets closer. It's a shining metal staff with the red Hydra at the top, tentacles spilling down. There's two men, both tall and broad. One is carrying the staff and the other has something shiny tucked against his side.

Steve doesn't look back.

He stops ten feet away, just out of reach. "I'm here. Now do what you promised."

The two men exchange a glance and the man with the staff twists his hand. Red light shoots into the sky, a thin pillar of crimson sparking lightning and something cracks high above. The noise echoes and Steve flinches.

Then the darkened disintegrates.

Steve imagines he can see splinters of light for a second and then the sun strips through, slivers spreading out like cracking glass. They widen and deepen and brighten and then the night is gone. It's 1 pm and the sun is high and bright and the snow is glowing around them, sparkling. Steve lifts his face and feels the warmth, lets himself bask for a moment, before he looks back.

He can see the two men clearly now. He can see that they are alone and they did walk and they're not carrying any restraints. They’re not expecting to leave here with a prisoner. He takes a deep breath and takes two steps forward. The sun is warm on his back.

The man without the staff lifts his arm and Steve sees the long oddly shaped gun in hand. There’s no question what is coming.

Steve hears his name behind him and he can't help it. He looks behind him.

Bucky is running toward him, metal arm flashing in the sun and his face is clear. His shadow stretches long behind him. "Steve," he shouts.

Iron Man is off the ground, repulsors shining blue and melting the snow beneath him. Natasha's running now too and Sam's wings are unfurling, casting a long shadow.

Bucky has his hand outstretched and Steve can see his eyes, blue gray with the sun across them. They’re so bright, they look like stars.

Steve smiles, the sun hot on his cheeks, and he's not looking when the gun barks out behind him and a deep red light hits him in the back of his head.

 

* * *

 

Bucky watches Steve walk away, crunching across the dark snow to where Hydra waits for him, bathed in red. His steps are measured and firm and his shoulders are back. He passes out of the circle of the flood lights, and he’s just a shadow moving over the ice. There’s wind whipping in rough bursts across the plain, picking up ice and snow and throwing it in white clumps that almost obscure Steve for a moment until they pass.

He can hear one of the SHOC guys, speaking quietly into his headset, and he clenches his fist. He wants to scream or rage or run after Steve.

They could take him too, he thinks. Two for the price of one. Just let him go with… he takes a step forward, drawn to Steve like he’s been all his life.

Sam’s hand goes to his elbow and Bucky looks back at him. “I can’t stop you if you want to go,” Sam says, mouth barely moving. “Hell, I want to go myself. But think of what he would want.”

Bucky turns back and Steve has stopped. He’s just feet away from the red circle of light Hydra is casting and Bucky thinks he can hear the timbre of his voice, just above the wind.

Something happens.

There’s a crackling hiss and red light is streaming upward, shooting up into the sky like a fork of electricity. It crackles and glows and the entire field is lit in eerie red, the snow hills in the distance and Steve’s golden head too far away. And then there is a tremendous crack, like the sky is shattering into a thousand pieces and about to rain down on them.

Sunlight. It glows and grows, rolling outward from the staff across the whole sky, shooting out toward the horizon like a thousand streams from melting snow. The warmth touches Bucky’s face. He blinks and raises a hand to shade his eyes, blinded by the new glare.

Steve is silhouetted now and he takes a step forward, toward Hydra.

Bucky can see now. It's two men: their dark shapes against the sky and a long staff and something glinting like metal in the hand of one of them. He focuses. Sees the gun.

He's running even as he shouts Steve's name. There's no hope of reaching him.

Steve turns. He's glowing. Sunlight in his hair and his eyes and across the snow around him. The blue sky is brilliant behind him. He turns and he sees Bucky.

Bucky thinks back to the courthouse steps. He thinks of Steve standing at the top, surrounded be enemies, turning to look into the camera. He remembers the sun on Steve's hair and the long shadow as Steve was handcuffed and taken into darkness.

Steve smiles.

He's still smiling when the red bolt hits the back of his head.

He hangs, suspended for a moment, mouth slackening out of the smile. His eyes go wide and his hand stretches like he's reaching. Then he's falling.

The snow doesn't make a sound when Steve sprawls across it, face down and arm still out flung. Or maybe Bucky just doesn't hear.

He can't hear anything. Everything is a numb roar and he slips on the ice and falls, feels his knees impact and he looks down for just a second.

When he looks up, Steve is gone. The two men and the staff and the gun are all gone. There's just empty snow stretching for miles.

Stark gets to the spot first. He's bending on to his knee and touching the place where Steve fell with one hand, pressing his palm flat as he tries to get a read with his sensors. His helmet is still up and Bucky can't read him in the rigid lines of Iron Man's armor. He doesn't move for a long moment and Bucky stays on his knees, just yards away, watching.

Sam is next to him just a second later, tugging him up and checking him over. "They didn't get you? No bleeding?" He tugs at the black jacket and Bucky shrugs him off, starts to push past him. Sam grabs him tighter, hands digging in. "Let him work, Bucky. Let him..."

Bucky pulls away more forcefully, stumbles up and past and toward the spot.

Natasha is there then. She's deadly calm, face impassive and her earpiece to the conversation back in Washington is still in place.

Iron Man looks up. "There's nothing," he says. He puts the visor up and he looks devastated.

"And the tracker? They couldn't have..."

"Steve's vitals cut out," Stark cuts him off. "Before they vanished. Steve flat lined."

 

* * *

 

The footage has been replayed over and over by every major news channel by the time they make it back to New York. It’s trending on Twitter and it’s the front banner of CNN. Google has changed it’s logo - black letters, twin shields instead of o’s and a flag flying at half mast off the l. There’s reporters at the foot of Avengers Tower - but they land on the roof and don’t look below.

They had stayed for a few hours after, searching the area fruitlessly. Back up from SHOC had arrived just an hour after Steve had "gone" (as Natasha had said in a wrecked voice when she had been radioing SHOC in) and they had cordoned off the plane with bright orange cones and red flares. Soldiers and scientists with their instruments had clustered around, staring at the empty space, and they set up bright floodlights lights for when the natural sunset finally came.

Of the Avengers, Vision was one of the first to arrive.

Tony was standing in the spot that they had vanished from, he hadn't left yet, and Vision joined him, cape gusting back behind him.

"I sense use of energies from outside this world," he had said quietly. "These men were playing with power they cannot hope to control for long. We will find them."

It hadn't brought any comfort.

"He was dead when they took him," he had said, unsparing in his tone. "It's no good. He's dead."

He had reviewed the data a dozen times already by the time he had talked with Vision. He had reviewed it again, after, on the trip home and then he would review it again hundreds of times in his lab, he knew. Over and over. Turning the puzzle from every angle in hopes of finding an answer. But it would never say anything different.

Steve had been calm, even when he had drawn close to the men and stopped to talk to them. His pulse had spiked a little when the darkness had faded. Again when he had heard Bucky shout his name.

Steve had turned and Tony had zoomed in on his face even as he had started to power after Barnes.

His systems had alerted him to the gun the second it was out - but only the smallest second had passed before the energy bolt had been fired.

Steve was looking at Barnes. He had smiled, his lungs had inflated with the last breath he would ever take. The red flare had hit the back of his head and the barest of a moment later, his heart had stopped pumping. He'd fallen in the snow, face down, arms never coming up to break his descent.

Barnes had fallen, shouting, and Tony had been just feet from Steve, when the two cloaked men and Steve's body had vanished. But, in the space between, he'd seen the blackened burn across the back of Steve's blonde head.

The footage on the TVs is shot from a distance, grainy and barely focused. Tony's glad that the rest of them can't see the second Steve's eyes had lost focus, the second his mouth had slackened, the way he’d lain still and blackened in the snow.

Barnes had been quiet. Sam had given him Steve's helmet at some point, covered him in a blanket, and Barnes'd held the blue cowl between his hands, pressed his fingers into it until his flesh knuckles had turned white. Tony had watched him and hadn't been able to say anything at all.

After they had landed, both Barnes and Sam had decided to head back to Avengers HQ right away. There were arrangements to be made and people to talk to. But, more than that, he could see that they both were uncomfortable here, in this place where Steve had come (and come back) to surrender himself.

He’d motioned for them to go, brusque, and promised to call if he found anything.

Natasha had given him a long look and then had gone with them.

So, now, Tony sits in the lab at the Tower alone. He watches the footage from his helmet cam, watches the data, stares at the empty place where the tracking chip should be broadcasting.

He's looking for anything: a hiccup, a stutter, a glitch - something to say that he didn't just watch Captain America die.

"Why would they take a dead body?" he asks, even though he knows the answer. Steve Rogers' body holds secrets that science would love to unlock.

He shudders and he thinks of a dark cave and hard hands forcing him underwater.

Data is still coming in a steady stream from the drop site and Tony forces himself from the past to the present.

The least he can do now is figure out where they've taken Steve. If nothing else, he owes Steve that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like a broken record - but thank you so much again for all your lovely comments and kudos! My editing process is going smoothly so the entirety of the story should be up by next Sunday or Monday, perhaps even sooner.


	6. Chapter 6

Steve wakes up with the disorientating sensation of being a breath from hitting the ground after a long fall.

His body jerks and he presses down hard on the surface beneath him, validating that he's on solid ground and not endlessly falling through space. He’s on something cold and smooth and when he opens his eyes, a man in a white lab coat is bent over him, frowning.

“You’re awake,” the man says. “That is good. Some subjects do not handle the effects of the transportation quite as well. It only took us about a minute to restart your heart. You should feel some remaining nausea and dizziness and disorientation. But that should fade. The IV should help with that.” He gestures.

Steve looks and sees a thick tube in his arm, going to to a bag hanging over his head. “Where am I?” he rasps. His head hurts, a deep pain battering against his inner skull. He flexes - but he doesn’t feel any new wounds in his calf or chest. They didn't get his trackers. Not yet. He tries turning his head further and sees two guards by a steel door.

The room is empty, save for the table he’s lying on, and windowless. It’s cramped and tiny and reminds him too much of his own cell. He tugs at his bonds, briefly surprised when they don’t budge.

“You are about 300 miles North of where your friends dropped you off,” the man says. “Your friends think you are dead. It’s all over the news. And even if they didn’t, they won’t find you. We’ve been given technology that enables us to block any transmitters that they might have fitted you with.” He looks behind him then turns back and begins to pull out Steve’s IV. “He’ll want to see you now.” Then to the guards by the door, “Get him up.”

The straps around his wrists flip up and the two guards drag him upright. As soon as his feet touch the floor, Steve’s legs buckle and he’s only kept upright by the tight grip the two men have around his upper arms. His head pounds and he's dizzy and sick, slumping in to the guards as they tug him out of the room.

The world blurs and twists and his head feels full, like he’s right on the brink of unconsciousness. It must've been a dream and he's back in the prison, he thinks, brain dropping into muzzy confusion. It was all a dream and he's back in Colorado and they're taking him to see the warden. He wonders blearily when visiting day is, if Sam is coming. He wants to see Sam. Tell him about his dream. Make sure Bucky is okay.

Bucky had been shouting to him and he'd looked so scared.

But no, that was the dream.

He doesn't fight as they drag him into the hallway. He has never fought. Not since that last day of freedom. Then he had left Bucky and came to New York and put down his shield and let them handcuff him.

They turn down one corridor and then into an elevator. It's steel and dark. They start going up and up and up and Steve knows that this isn't the prison. None of it was a dream. He's not in Colorado. He's with Hydra and he's not dead yet.

Everything is jumbled and cloudy and he tries to remember what had happened.

There had been daylight. So much daylight. Pouring over snowy fields and he had turned and Bucky had been running.

The elevator doors open and Steve is dragged into a well lit room. There are monitors and computers and long tables, thick office carpet on the floor. It looks like SHIELD use to, he thinks. It looks like the Triskelion before the helicarriers crashed into it.

People, dressed in Hydra black, are moving to and fro, talking quietly but urgently. A phone rings and Steve can hear a news anchor talking in low tones. He cranes to find the TV and gets a glimpse of a CNN logo, the headline across the bottom reads: “Captain America confirmed dead.” He is dragged away before he can see more.

As people see them, activity slowly comes to a halt. Papers are set down and conversations are halted. They’re all watching him get dragged down the center aisle toward a wide set of double doors.

Steve tries to gain his feet, tries to dig in his heels and at least make a fight of it. Whatever is waiting behind those doors is something he wants no part in, he’s sure of that. It’s no use. Every part of him feels shaky and sick. He feels like he did before the serum, like if he closes his eyes, he’ll be back in Brooklyn with Bucky and this all will have been a fevered dream. He almost smiles at the idea, smiles at the thought of a bare apartment that was cold in winter and hot in summer and Bucky had been young and so happy.

The doors part and Steve is pulled through.

“Captain, good to see you again,” a rough voice says and Steve feels something cold slither down his back. He recognizes the voice.

There’s large windows against the far wall and Steve can see craggy cliffs of ice and sun and blue sky, stretching out into a blurry horizon. A man is silhouetted against the landscape and as he walks toward Steve, his features slowly come into the light.

His face is twisted and scarred, mouth pulled back in a permanent snarl. The flesh is bubbled and dark along his cheekbones and jaw like a blow torch had been dragged across, Thick scar tissue twists at the corner of his eyes and into his hairline and, when he smiles, Steve realizes that he has no lips. There is a tattoo across the scars, starting at the forehead and going down, wrapping around a warped nose and down his neck until it disappears into the black t-shirt he is wearing. It’s the red tendrils of Hydra, Steve sees, twisted lovingly around the bubbled flesh like it has taken root there.

“Rumlow,” he says back, heavy dread is sitting in his stomach. “I thought you were dead.”

“Never assume, Captain. It leaves you unprepared.” Brock Rumlow sits down at a long table. “I suppose you’re wondering why you are here.”

Steve doesn’t respond. He feels steadier on his feet now but he stays sagged against the guards in a parody of weakness.

“I almost died that day, Cap. As it is, it left me some scars. I lay there in my hospital bed and I saw you - you looking like nothing had happened. After all you had destroyed. After all you had taken from me.” He leans down in his chair. “Do you know what Hydra had promised? I would’ve been general of their armies. I would’ve brought the world to heel at our feet. I would’ve stood on your skull. I would’ve worn your teeth as a necklace. I would’ve taken your boy, Barnes, as my pet.”

A growl builds in Steve’s chest and Rumlow laughs. It’s a raspy, nasally sound that drags across Steve’s ears like gravel.

“You took that from me. But Hydra is strong. When one head is gone - two more come. And, I was the chosen one. I was the one gifted with overseeing the rebirth of Hydra. You think Hydra was invented by the Red Skull one hundred years ago? Hydra is from places outside this earth, Captain, and they’ll keep coming back. Keep planting seeds until they have succeeded. They have given me the power, Cap. More power than you can dream. Technology beyond this realm’s best offerings. We will conquer the earth - and I won’t be a general anymore. I will be a god.”

He looks at Steve. “They will worship me. As they once worshipped you.” His voice goes low and rough. “How sweet it was, to see you brought low, to see the people who worshipped you cast you off your pedestal. Tear down your idols. To see you small and weak and useless as my powers grew and grew. How quickly you lost your powers.” Rumlow turns, his gaze going out the window, and Steve sees his opportunity.

He lunges, breaks free of the guards holding his arms and goes for Rumlow’s throat. If he can just catch him by surprise, he might be able to make it to the window. It’s a long enough drop. It’ll be sure to kill them both. And Bucky already thinks he’s dead so this will just be one more good thing Steve can do.

His fingers close about Rumlow’s neck and they both go flipping over the chair. Steve feels his back hit the table, feels Rumlow’s fist land in his stomach, but he doesn’t let go. He rolls them both to the left, putting himself on top and uses his upper position to slam Rumlow’s head against the floor.

Rum low’s fists against his chest slacken slightly.

The guards are shouting behind him, door bursting open to let more in, and he rears back to headbutt Rumlow, knock him out for good, when something deep and painful crashes into him. It’s a taser, he realizes even as his hands loosen of their own accord and he flops backward enough to give Rumlow an opportunity to kick him off. He should be able to fight this off, should be able to push back. But weakness, from the transportation or the months in jail, is still lingering and he can feel his heart stutter in his chest. The world blurs for a second and when everything rights itself, he’s on his stomach, hands pulled painfully behind him and legs fastened together with manacles.

“I could kill you,” Rumlow spits at him, his lip is bleeding and red is down his chin. “I could slaughter you and cut you into pieces and leave you floating on an iceberg for your Barnes to find. How about that? How would he react to seeing you in so many pieces that not even your scientists could put you back together? I’d put your dick on the top. Just for him to find. Would you like to see him recover from that?”

Steve gasps and tries to inhale more than musty carpet. There’s blood dripping from his nose where his face hit the ground. “You need me alive,” he says, forcing out the words over something large and deep and afraid in his belly, “or you would’ve already done that.”

Rumlow hisses between his teeth and then jerks his head at the guards. “Bring him.”

They drag him out of the room, back through the computers and the desks, and back into the elevator. All the workers watch him go with knowing eyes.

There’s two guards holding him now and two more men with guns behind. Steve lets his head sag and watches the drops of blood from his nose trail down his shirt and drag over the carpet. They go down and when the doors open this time, all there is a staircase, narrow stone steps descending down in a steep curve.

An elevator to a staircase. Steve huffs a chuckle around the blood from his nose and gets the snout of a gun pressed against his back for his troubles.

When he looks at the guards as they begin to move downward, he sees one's hands shaking on his gun. All the guards are silent now - even Rumlow has stopped talking. The only sound is the boots on the ground and the clank of Steve’s chains as he’s hauled down the steps. They go down and down.

The air warms around them, like a deep fire lives beneath the stone. There’s something red and dusky reflecting on the curving wall, a sun dying just out of sight.

“I have seen the face of Hydra, Captain,” Rumlow says at last as the red grows brighter and brighter. “They have given me power beyond my dreams. I blotted out the very sun from the world. I have brought you to me with a flick of my fingers. And this will just be the beginning of what they will allow me to accomplish. The world will kneel before me. Before us. There is just one piece missing. One last thing is missing before our plans are complete.”

The heat is welling up to almost sweltering levels now and Steve blinks against a sudden brightness as the stairs turn and suddenly they are all in a large room. A deep red is glowing from the floor and soaking up the walls until it almost seems wet and alive. In the very core of the light, boiling in the center of the room, there is something dark and squirming, long flickers of dark tongues that lap at the edges of the room. It's lifting above the ground and flexing and humming and hissing. The air is sweet and cloying and Steve is afraid. He can hear one of the guards breathing fast and the fingers holding him up are shaking.

Rumlow turns to him and seems to grow, his shadow lengthening. His eyes glow brighter in his scarred face until they seem to emanate light, burning red and hot against the whorls of the scars and tattoos. “They need a host.”

 

* * *

 

When the liaison from the US Government brings up the idea of a state funeral, Natasha is the one that curls her fingers around James's arm and holds tight.

She can feel him shaking beneath her fingers, shattering apart in ways she can't even imagine. Her own chest hurts.

It’s only been four days, after all. Only four days since she stood in Greenland and let Steve go to his death. It feels like longer - but the pain still feels sharp like she’s watching it over and over again, the same scene endlessly replaying and the hurt never getting better. Yesterday, they had officially confirmed Steve’s death, an unnecessary formality since everyone had seen Steve fall. Flags had gone to half mast. The Capitol had been draped in black.

There were still SHOC agents on the scene in Greenland, looking for clues about where and how the men who killed Steve could’ve gone. But the larger concern was Hydra preparing another attack, recovering Steve’s body had become an afterthought. Both her and Tony had received strongly worded missives about how they were needed in various locations to evaluate down potential Hydra targets in the last day. So far, they had been allowed to decline and continue to devote all their time on tracking the energy signatures that could potentially lead them to Steve’s body, but Natasha knew SHOC wouldn’t stay gracious for long.

If they wanted time to bring Steve home, they had to play nice.

So Sam is the only one who ends up on his feet. He doesn't yell. But he stands, tall and broad in a way that reminds her of Steve. He glares for a long moment and then says, "we'll get back to you on that.” His voice is cold and stiff, like the liaison had just asked them what type of baby they would prefer for dinner.

It’s enough. The liaison mutters some excuse and flees.

Sam sits down and puts his face in his hands and James closes his eyes.

They are all broken. But someone needs to be strong right now so Natasha gathers herself.

She thinks of Steve's face in the tiny, claustrophobic meeting room at the prison, solid and set even as he looked out over a desolating expanse of years, and tries to carve her mouth the same way. She remembers the way he hugged her, in those last moments, and tries to pull his strength into her own body.

"They'll want some sort of memorial," she says, steady and practical. "We can't exactly stop them."

"They left him to rot in that cell," Sam snaps back. "They weren't ever going to let him out. You know that. And now they're making him dance for their PR even after he's dead."

James flinches hard at the last word and Sam's face falls - but he doesn't apologize.

"We'll do something small," she says at last. "Just us. After we bring him home. But if we want their resources to keep helping us, we need to play ball."

Neither of them say anything for a long moment. And then, James, with his face bent toward the table says, "I'm glad he's free from them." He looks up and his eyes are gazing out the window at the trees. Then he looks at her, “will you do it?” he asks. “I don’t think I…” his voice trails and he has to take a deep breath.

She nods. “I’ll take care of it.”

Once she gives the go ahead to hold a public memorial (she draws the line at calling it a funeral) to the shaky liaison, things move fast. The funeral will be in D.C., at the WWII memorial, with a wide assortment of dignitaries and politicians and all the pomp and circumstance. None of this is about Steve Rogers and all of this is about the US Government trying to make sure that nobody remembers who exactly locked Captain America into prison all of those years ago.

They were scared. She could see it in the eyes of every government official that day across from her with increasingly elaborate plans on how to honor Captain America. People had been scared and in shock back then (back when Steve had been desperate to save Bucky and Tony had been desperate to fix the world and things had all fallen apart) and it had been easy to convince them that Steve Rogers was a traitor that needed to be kept away from society - easy to brand him a threat and use him as a scapegoat for all their woes.

Now, in the streaming sunlight and the camera footage of Steve saluting before he turned to trek across the ice to his death, it would be very hard convince anyone that Steve Rogers was anything but a hero. And, so, the men that had once locked Steve in a very small room and fought tooth and nail to keep him there were doing their best to pretend that it had never happened - that Steve hadn’t been in prison for all those months and years.

She'd actually heard a news anchor call those two years in prison a “sabbatical.” Another had called it an “involuntary early retirement,” as if Steve had been sitting down in Florida by the pool and playing bingo on Friday nights. Maybe, even among the public, there’s an impulse to pretend that Steve had been happy the last couple years, that he’d had something good in his life before he had died for all of them. The truth was ugly and hard and it ate at her every day.

So, when the day of the memorial dawns, there are American flags lining the Reflecting Pool and huge bouquets of roses are displayed around the granite pillars circling the WWII memorial. The sky is clear and blue and the sun is bright like it's making up for lost time. There's a thin breeze, pushing small ripples across the water. She and James pace the interior of the WWII memorial together and a fine spray from the fountain dusts her cheeks.

They've closed off 17th st and there's a small lectern set up at the entrance to the memorial, the Rainbow Pool and the Wall of Remembrance creating the backdrop. White chairs have been set up, first in the road and then stretching back to the lawn in front of the Washington Monument. There are TV cameras in the aisles and the corners and the front near the new Captain America monument that they’re unveiling.

'A Final Salute,' it's called, by some artist she's never heard of but who the liaison assured her was suitably well regarded to be have been commissioned with such a momentous (the word the liaison used) task. They had sent over a photograph to Natasha yesterday and she had stared down at the bronze bust of Steve saluting the camera before he walked off his death. His face looked wrong in the bronze, too narrow and too stern and too cold. Is that how he had looked to those who didn't know him? Who hadn't seen the way he had curled into James, like he was cold and small, for the flight from Greenland to New York?

The memorial is open to the public, only the front rows taped off for dignitaries and what the organizers generously referred to as "family."

There isn't a single person left alive on this earth that shared blood with Steve Rogers. So, instead, it’s her and Wanda and Tony and Pepper and Sam and Rhodes and James that all sit in the front row (so the news crews can get a good shot, she thinks a little bitterly).

Sharon comes a little later, slides in on the end, with her hands clasped together like she’s praying.

They’re all in black suits. There had been some discussion about military uniforms - but, as James had pointed out, Steve had not been on active duty or even enlisted when he died. He had died a civilian, if not a prisoner, no matter how much the White House wanted to pretend otherwise. So the shield is at home and James is in a neatly pressed suit.

He hadn’t really slept in three days. Natasha knows because Sam told her - also she can read the weariness in his shoulders. When he wasn’t on video conference with Tony, he was on the phone with the SHOC agents still on the scene in Greenland. When he wasn’t doing either of those, he was in the gym training or in the control room, watching the global incident tracker. The few times he’d been forced into his room, he’d sat on the low couch and watched the footage of those last few moments. Steve’s salute. Steve’s long walk across the ice. This morning, he’d been already on the tarmac at the Avengers facility when they had arrived, hair slicked back and face turned down.

Now he sits quietly, staring straight ahead as mourners file to their seats. His hands are loose in his lap and his face is blank. He is dry-eyed. As if he hears her thoughts, he turns briefly and catches her gaze. He looks so tired, so tired and old. Then he turns back, staring over the water like he’s looking for something.

A Catholic priest walks up to the lectern and folds his hands.

The words buzz in her ears, meaningless in the span of the world.

Generals get up. Presidents get up. Ambassadors get up. They walk to the lectern and give pretty but empty eulogies to Captain America. They talk about valor and bravery and strength of spirit. She can't help but marvel as they all appear just a little damp around the eyes. The lengths they go through to mourn the man they killed.

Lastly, Tony gets up. Bucky had refused to speak. Tony keeps it short - but even then, Natasha only catches pieces.

"A loving friend and brother and hero...The world is a darker place... We owe a debt that can never be repaid..."

He doesn't take off his sunglasses.

When it’s ending, they do a 21-gun salute over the water. The sounds echo like a grave closing.

Natasha thinks about what Bucky said in that room, about Steve being free, and she tilts her face to the sky. Who knows what she believes, what comes after this life. But she hopes, that wherever Steve is, he is free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for their feedback and kudos! They all are amazing :) 
> 
> There's about 17k to 18k remaining, spread out over four chapters.


	7. Chapter 7

Steve is in the dark.

He reaches out for the wall of his familiar cell, to trace along and find the switch that should be just above his cot. The guards at the supermax can manually override the switch any time but they don't do it regularly. They'll let him have light.

He reaches and reaches. But there is no wall. Hot air blows across his face and, when he breathes in, it smells of rotten eggs. A deep pressure is building, both inside and outside of him.

It's almost like he can hear voices. There's something echoing, a quiet murmur just out of reach. "Hello?" he calls back, stumbles forward another few blind steps. The pressure increases, like he is a child's toy and he's being squeezed around his middle until his head pops off. The murmurs swell and, with them, a sharp buzzing that grinds against his ears. It’s like a chainsaw drilling away at his bones.

This is hell, he finally realizes, when another gust of hot air hits his face hard, thick and almost alive. He must be dead.

The thought isn't as disquieting as he knows it should be.

There were times, in that small cell in Colorado with his books and his bed and his shower, that he had believed he was in hell too. Living hell. Left forgotten and trapped in an ever shrinking space while the world moved on and forgot him. Sometimes he had dreamed of the day Natasha would come and tell him they had all moved on. The slow torture of watching the people he most loved erase him from their minds. In that cell, he had stared in his dim mirror, at his unlined face, and wondered if he would still be there in 200 years.

At least, now, that is over. He can rest.

Then the darkness shimmers hard. It's like a ripple in a still pond, the blackness hot and alive and trembling around him, squeezing ever tighter. The grinding noise grows and the voices echo above it, still indistinct - but it's like they're shouting now.

He twists, discomfited, and falls and falls, like the floor suddenly just went away. The air feels almost soupy, heat dragging against his fingers as he tumbles. He's weightless and a stone at the same time and he tries to twist so at least he'll take the brunt of whatever impact is coming on his shoulder and not his head.

There's a rushing noise, a feeling like becoming corporeal, and he opens his eyes.

He's in a large room. A window across from him shows snow and ice and blue sky. The air is cold on his face and there is no buzzing. There’s a slow rumble, like machinery far away. He can hear the scrape of shoes on stone and the hum of a vent. There’s a map laid out in front of him: Washington D.C., he immediately sees. He sees the Capitol and the White House and rebuilt Triskelion. There’s troop positions around it, like they are preparing for a siege.

"I do believe the good ol’ Cap is back with us."

His head turns. It feels slow and heavy like he has to think about shifting every muscle and joint and tendon just to accomplish the maneuver.

Rumlow is next to him. He's smiling and his scars pull grotesquely around the expression. There's a flutter in his throat and it takes Steve a moment to realize he's watching blood vessels pulse under his thin, ruined skin. His eyes narrow on Steve. “Comfy in there with your new friend, Cap?”

The pressure returns, suddenly and fiercely. His head pounds and sharp pinpricks appear all over, a thousand tiny ants gnawing through his skin. It burns and sizzles and he wants to scratch his own skin off.

There is something there. A presence just out of the corner of his eye. Except not out of the corner of his eye. Inside. Beneath his own flesh, twined around his muscles and draped over his bones, crawling and pressing and occupying like an invading army. Something slimy and crawling and powerful that has invaded his every pore and every breath until he has been crammed into a tiny corner of his own mind, crushed like ant and left to flop helplessly in a corner.

He feels his own lips pull a grin, the muscles clunky, like he's a child's puppet.

"Oh I think we like each other just fine," his mouth says. His voice is slower than normal, monotone. It makes Steve shudder.

There is nothing material to fight against. Steve wants to raise his fists and put his chin up and rage against the enemy - but he can't even struggle. There is nothing to struggled against. Just a pressure in his head and the overwhelming sense of not being alone in his own body. His fingers twitch and then still and he wants to shout but can't.

"It's okay, Steve," says a familiar voice.

His thoughts skitter to a halt and he feels his fingers flex again. He strains to make his eyes focus and a shape coalesces from the other side of the room.

Bucky steps forward and he's smiling, hands outstretched just a little from his side. His hair is pulled back in a pony tail and his eyes are clear. "It's okay," he says again, softly. "I won't leave."

"What's he looking at?" Rumlow snaps.

"He's hallucinating," his own mouth answers.

Steve knows this isn't real. He knows Bucky is faraway and safe and Steve wouldn't want him here anyway, in the cold and dark and pressure anyway, but he'll take this small comfort. It might be the last one he ever gets.

"I'm scared," he thinks at Bucky because he doesn't have to be strong for his own hallucinations. He's already gone over the edge. It's a battle he's already lost.

"I know. But I'm here now. And we can face it together." Bucky touches his face and it feels so real.

And Steve just lets himself drift.

 

* * *

 

 

Bucky wakes up. It's six am. It's been three weeks since Steve died. He can see sunlight filtering through the dark curtains and there's coffee brewing in the kitchen. Wilson had set it up on a timer - the every day magic of living in the future.

On the first morning after the funeral, he hadn't gotten out of bed. He had awoken to the filtered sunlight and the smell of coffee and the sounds of Wilson in the kitchen and he just hadn't been able to move. The shield had been right next to his bed and he had stared at it until his eyes had burned. The world had felt very claustrophobic and heavy. There was no future date that would bring Steve back to him. There were no preparations left to make. There was just an endless string of mornings where he would wake up alone. Wilson had eventually come in, sat down on the empty half of the bed.

"I miss him too," he had said, voice low. "But you know that he would get up. Get angry if you need to. But we need you with us."

So Bucky had gotten up. He'd gone to the gym to spar with Wanda. He'd gone over the last situation reports with Natasha. He'd texted Tony. And he had reminded himself to keep breathing. Just one more breath. Just one more hour without Steve.

The loss of Steve is a festering wound. He thinks it might always be. It will be a part of his life that always exists, just waiting for him to rub against the weeping scab and feel the same sharp spike of pain that he did in those first few days. It won't ever fully scar over, won't heal. It'll always be a weeping wound. He'll just have to learn to live, to fight, to keep going with it there.

Some day, he thinks, he won't have to remind himself to breathe. He will get up without feeling like there's an eternity crushing down on him.

He washes his face, brushes his teeth, and pulls his hair back tightly, looping the hair tie tightly until he can feel the tightness of his hair in his scalp. He stares in the mirror, at the dark circles under his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks.

There are times, still, when his face feels unfamiliar and bulky, a mask stretched awkwardly over bone and metal.

He'd always thought that when Steve got back, things would be better. That through Steve's gaze he could reconnect with the man that wasn't just bone and metal. Steve made him feel like himself. Steve had made him feel like himself. It had been a dream he had held onto.

Now, there is no solace when the ache of missing Steve overpowers him. Even though Steve hadn't been a constant physical presence these last years, something fundamental has changed. Something has been lost. There is no Steve on the other end of hacked security cam. There's no reports from Wilson or Natasha about how he's doing.

It almost feels wrong to prefer Steve to be back in that claustrophobic cell. But, at least, then, Bucky had hope of him coming home. Now there is nothing. The hole will never go away. He just has to live through it.

He raps the shield once with his flesh knuckles when he finishes getting dressed. "I'm trying, Steve," he tells the star. "I'm trying."

Wilson is in the kitchen when he comes in, already drinking coffee and reading the paper, as he has been every morning since Greenland. He looks up when Bucky comes in. "Hey, man, just wanted to see if you wanted to go to the gym this morning. Nat was going to meet us."

"You don't have to keep babysitting me," Bucky says instead of answering. "I'm okay."

It's a lie. But Wilson is gracious enough to not call him on it.

"Maybe I'm the one that's not okay." Sam gets up and pours him a cup of the coffee. "It's only been three weeks, Bucky. No one is supposed to be okay."

When Bucky closes his eyes, he sees Steve turning and smiling at him just as the red bolt hits the back of his head. He sees white fields and red and Steve laying on the snow, face down. He dreams of turning Steve over and wiping the blood from his mouth while he gasps and pressing one last kiss to his mouth before his eyes dim and his hands go still and his lips go cold.

And that's the good dream. Because, in reality, Steve died before he hit the ground. In reality, Steve's body is on a cold table in a dark Hydra lab and Bucky can't even protect him in death.

He doesn't think about the bad dreams.

"I'm not going to fall apart, Sam," he says at last. "Steve wouldn't want me to."

It's the truth that Bucky has been holding. It's what is getting him up every morning. That Steve wants him to keep going - that Steve's team (and, through a war and imprisonment and years and death, they're still Steve's team, will always be Steve's team) needs him.

So, every day, he wakes up, washes his face, goes to the gym and spars with Sam and Nat. He trains with Wanda. He talks to Tony. He perseveres because Steve's legacy is worth living up to.

Somewhere, in a dark corner of his mind, he hopes that someday he will be able to stand back and feel that he did his duty. He will see a strong team that no longer needs an extra pair of shoulders. And, when that day comes, well, he still has his motorcycle and the road is long and dangerous.

And that's when Natasha opens the door without knocking. "You need to come to the situation room," she says. She's pale and her mouth is a thin line.

“Natasha?” Sam says, already standing.

Bucky shatters the coffee cup he’d been holding in his metal hand. The coffee splashes across the table and the shards hit the ground and Bucky feels something deep inside curl up. “What?” he says.

Natasha meets his gaze, steady. Bucky remembers the first time she came back from visiting Steve. She’d come back to his room and sat down on the floor, cross legged, long fingers curled around the long sleeves of her sweater. “Whenever he says,” she had said, calm like ice. “Whenever, we’ll get him out of there.”

She’s calm again, just like that day, but Bucky thinks something is broken in her eyes. “One of Steve’s trackers came back on. Tony has eyes on it.”

In the situation room, Tony’s on the screens, from his tower lab in Manhattan. He’s off center on the screen and focused on something below the view of the camera and when he looks up, his eyes go to Bucky's first. He looks like the first day after Steve went to the supermax, Bucky thinks. Off-balanced and a bit lost and scared but determined. Somehow, it gives Bucky hope.

"His tracker picked up somewhere off of Russia," he says, no time for pleasantries. "It looks like he's moving. Not fast enough to be a plane though. A ship maybe?"

"Any life signs?" Sam asks.

Tony purses his mouth and wobbles his head in something that isn’t quite a shake. "The data seems corrupted. Like I'm getting it through interference or the base tracker was damaged. So it could be that they're just not coming through. But I'm not picking up any sign that he's alive."

There hadn't been much hope but still Bucky feels even more exhausted at the news.

"So what then? Hydra is moving his body to a new location?" Sam chews on his thumbnail.

"I don't know. That's my guess. It's our best chance, though, at getting him back." Tony's words stumble to a halt and then looks down at the console. "I mean, getting it back. His body. Getting his body back."

Bucky is already nodding. It doesn’t matter if it’s just Steve’s body. "So we go. When can we be ready to leave?"

Natasha shrugs at his question. "The quinjet is fueled. How fast can you make it to the hangar?"

Bucky looks back at the screens, at Tony staring back, exhausted. "Suit up," he says, feeling the echo of Steve in his words. "Can you be here in 20 minutes?"

A worn smile cracks Tony's face, not true happiness, something colder. "I'll beat you there, terminator." The screen blinks to black

Bucky knows the feeling. Something is burning, fierce and urgent, inside. Steve may be dead. But at least Bucky can do this for him. It's time for Steve to finish coming home. Bucky thinks Steve hasn't been home since that morning in the cabin in the forests. This is their mission now. Bring him home to rest.

Down in the hangar, it's Natasha, Sam and him on the plane. Wanda and Vision had stayed back to make sure they weren't leaving the home fires unwatched and Rhodey was in D.C. for a meeting with the Joint Chiefs - he says he’ll come if they need him. Natasha is in the pilot’s seat. They have other pilots at HQ, but Bucky doesn't say anything when she takes over the controls herself. This is something they need to do themselves.

They get airborne in a half hour and Stark meets them just over the New York state line, clunking into the back landing area just above the cloud line and immediately dropping his visor. He looks better than he did on the call, a little more fire in his eyes. His suit folds back smoothly into a briefcase that he stores against wall before he goes to straight to the computers banks that line one side of the quinjet.

"Friday," he says. "Pull up the tracking program for me."

The screens flicker and then a map of North America materializes, stretching across the giant screen. The green dot of Steve is off the Washington coast now, maybe forty miles off shore. Bucky watches it blink and thinks, I'm coming.

But things are never simple. They're only in the air for moments more when things begin to go belly up.

The green dot, a careful, precise blinking point that will lead them to Steve, starts speeding up. It had been proceeding at a fairly steady pace ("About 70 miles per hour," Tony had said.) and then it jumps to 100. Then 200. Then 300. Then faster still. Faster than they're going. Faster than they could go.

"They're airborne." Tony is typing at the keyboard, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. "The elevation is rising. Some kind of jet. Faster than anything we have."

The dot banks sharply, turning over the mainland around Oregon. Bucky thinks of the house on the coast there, with its wide porch and clear windows and the way the waves broke on the rocks. He thinks of how Steve would’ve sat by the upper bay window, sketch pad and pencil in his hands. He would’ve watched the sun set and the sun rise. He would’ve watched the seagulls and the whales and the storms moving in. All of that’s gone now. All that’s left is a green blinking dot that’s movie inland.

"Give me a second and I can..." Tony types rapid fire and then his hands fall away - by the time he's done, Steve's dot is almost into Idaho. "I think they're headed for Washington, D.C.." A long red line is extending out from the dot, plotting the course.

Another attack? Bucky imagines Hydra hanging Steve's body from the Capitol like a grisly flag. Imagines them holding Steve up like a trophy or a puppet. He grips the straps of the shield with his flesh arm, he hasn't put it down since he got on the jet. "Can we intercept them?"

"We can try. But they're moving really fast. It'll be close. Natasha?"

"Already on it."

The quinjet banks sharply and Bucky grabs the overhead with his metal hand.

"I'm going to call Rhodey. Alert the military. We need them in the loop on this." Wilson is heading back toward the comm station.

By the time they enter D.C. airspace only two hours later, fighter jets have been scrambled. There’s three in the air, following them in as they follow the green dot. Tony has Iron Man back on and he's standing at the back, talking to the pilots. Sam's next to him, wings on and goggles right against his head. Bucky’s just behind them. He feels itchy, desperate for action after weeks of sitting with his thumb up his ass.

"No, they should be coming in over the Potomac. You don't see them?" Tony’s squinting over the green landscape like he could see the plane with the naked eye if he just tried hard enough. It's cloudy, no sun, but visibility this low is fine.

"Nothing on radar, sir. Are you sure your data is right?"

"Of course, it's right," Tony barks back. "I'm going out. Find them myself. Wilson?"

"Ready."

Tony twists, looks back at Bucky. "You and Natasha good, Sarge?"

Bucky nods. "Go."

He watches them both plummet out the back, puts his own earpiece in and climbs into the copilot seat next to Natasha, pulls down his flight harness. "ETA two minutes," he says over the comms. "See anything?"

"Nothing but blue sky," Sam comes back.

Bucky looks down at the green dot of Steve, the blue dots of Tony and Sam, and the red dots of the fighter jets. The weight of Steve’s shield is on his back. "You should be able to have eyes on it. You're close."

"We know that, sparky. But we're still not seeing anything." Tony's dot is weaving around the area of Steve’s green dot. “Some kind of cloak…” the words are cut off by a spray of explosions. A dark shape streaks into existence with a flash that even Bucky can see from the cockpit. It’s long and sleek and red flashes burst in the air around it, thick ribbons of light that manage to seem bright even in the daylight.

“Shit!” Wilson calls over the comms. “We’re taking fire.”

The tail of one of the fighter jets explodes in a shower of flame and sparks and the pilot ejects into the air. A moment later, the entire plane blows up and the percussion of the blast sends Tony tumbling.

“I’m okay,” he calls out, righting himself, repulsers firing in the sky. “But those things pack a punch. They’re dropping altitude. I think they’re going for the landing.”

“My targeting system still can’t see it,” one of the remaining pilots says over the comms. “Can’t get a lock. Trying to fire blind here.”

“Just don’t hit me,” Sam snaps back.

Another spurt of red and the second fighter jet catches fire, pilot ejecting just before the subsequent explosion.

“The jets are sitting ducks,” Bucky says. “Peel off, regroup at a distance with reinforcements. Sam, pursue, but don’t engage. Make sure we see where they land. Tony, can you get a visual inside the cockpit? Get an idea of what we’re dealing with?”

“ETA 30 seconds,” Natasha says next to him. “I can see Rhodey.”

Bucky looks out the front, down the National Mall. Rhodey is waiting near the reflecting pool, fully garbed in War Machine. He’s surrounded by squadron, fatigues matching the green of the grass, anti-aircraft weaponry already set up and pointing at the sky. “Rhodes, we’re coming in hot.”

“Barnes,” Tony’s bark is sharp and Bucky’s gaze jerks back to the sky. “They’re landing.”

The aircraft is descending straight down, almost like a helicopter.

“Brace,” Natasha calls out and the quinjet lands and jerks to a halt, bumping once hard and then they’re on the ground, skidding a dozen yards, about midway down the National Mall. Something screeches hard and Bucky jolts forward, catching himself against the console with his metal arm. She breathes out hard when they’ve stopped and Bucky thinks he can see her hands tremble once before she releases the controls.

Out the windshield, Bucky watches the strange aircraft descending further up the lawn, closer to the Capitol. It lands silkily, barely seeming to impact. And then, there are other aircraft, just like it, descending too. Two, three, six, ten. At least a dozen aircraft are landing on the lawn, smooth like this had been planned all along.

“Stark. Wilson.” Bucky is already undoing his flight harness.

“I see.”

“Anyone in the Capitol?” Natasha asks. She’s tucking guns into her holsters, her stinger in her hands. She puts down the back and they’re both running out together.

“Just military personnel,” Rhodes answers back over the comms. “We finished evacuating just before you arrived.”

This is more than just a body dump. This is a full out attack.

Brazen, Bucky thinks. But, why?

“We need to get a perimeter set up, box them in. We can’t let them get away. Rhodes? Can you do that?” Bucky can see troops running out the doors of the Capitol, scrambling ants heading toward an oncoming horde. He’s still over a hundred yards from the planes.

“On it.”

The bellies of the planes are opening and Bucky pulls a gun from his holster and drops to a crouch behind the shield. This wasn’t what they had expected. There was something else going on here and he just had to figure it out. All of this to just show off Steve’s dead body? And, if it was an invasion, why bring Steve along? It didn’t make sense.

He looks across the green lawn, at the dark planes, and sees the black garbed soldiers marching out, helmeted, masked and armed. Then, in the middle of the black helmets, he sees a blonde head. And he hears his pulse pounding in his ears. The world goes sharp and bright and slow and he sees Steve turn his head and look in his direction.

First, there’s a sickening drop of relief. He feels himself lean forward, like he’s about to run to Steve, drop the shield and the gun and just run and grab him and take him away from the soldiers and the guns and the government buildings. “I’m here to save you,” Bucky would tell him, “like you’ve saved me.” But there are no handcuffs on Steve’s wrists, no gun to his head. He doesn’t look cowed and broken - he looks like he’s in charge. But Bucky knows better than anyone that there are ways to take people prisoner that have nothing to do with overt threats or restraints.

There’s something deeply wrong.

“Hold your fire,” he whispers over the comms, making his voice as menacing as he can. “Do not shoot.”

Steve is wearing all black, red hydra in the center of his chest, a parody of the Captain America uniform, and when he sees the shield that Bucky is holding, he salutes sharply. His face twists in a smile and then he turns on heel. They're moving toward the Capitol.

"Barnes?" Stark says over the comms and he sounds uncertain.

His throat is dry and his tongue is leaden. He's staring after Steve. "They're going to try to take the Capitol," he says. "Steve is... Don't shoot Steve. Don't hurt him. We don't know..."

Natasha is beside him then and she puts one hand on his arm. "Go," she mouths. "I got this."

He starts running.

He can hear Natasha getting men into position, pulling men who are inside the Capitol to the steps, having Tony and Rhodes circle around and lay down cover fire, sending Sam to make sure any civilians are clear. He hears it - but his focus is straight ahead.

"Steve," he shouts.

The helmeted soldiers turn and he barely gets the shield up in time. The bullets ricochet off and he ducks behind a concrete pillar, returning fire. The pop pop of his gun pushes against his ribs and he narrows his eyes along the sight line, eyeing the men at Steve's back like he's always done.

Two men fall and don't get back up.

He hears a whoosh of air and then a sharp explosion goes off: three of the jets taken out of by Iron Man's shoulder missiles.

Up on the Capitol steps, the marines have formed a jagged contingent, barricaded by assault shields. Bucky can see a machine gun being set up at the top of the steps. Steve and his soldiers aren't slowing down - they're not rushing but they're moving steadily and confidently, like they’re going into battle. He starts running again. He won't let Steve be gunned down.

Crazily, he wonders if this had been Steve's plan all along. If, somewhere in that tiny cell in that awful prison as the months had ticked past him, Steve had grown hot and bitter against the people who put him there. You should've told me, he wants to call out, I would've always been on your side. (Because that’s the truth. He chooses Steve Rogers. And if Steve Rogers had wanted revenge, Bucky Barnes would’ve lined up behind him.)

But he knows that this is not that. He knows Steve like he knows his bones, knows him the way he knows how to pull a trigger. This is not Steve.

He can see Falcon swinging down above him, wings outstretched, like he's planning on plucking Steve off the ground like a fat field mouse. Natasha is coming up the side, a whole squad flanking her.

"Steve," he shouts again, just as the group of them reached the steps. In his mind's eye, the scene overlaps with the one of that day: Steve climbing the courthouse steps with Tony next to him and the men with handcuffs at the top. He hadn’t been able to reach Steve then.

Steve doesn't turn his whole body, just looks over his shoulder, and his eyes are black like huge wells of oil. His mouth moves like he's giving an order. Bucky wonders what he’s saying… and then there's a whoosh like a balloon getting free and a sucker punch to Bucky's gut that knocks him off course.

He staggers hard, listing. His grip loosens on the gun and he feels the hot pulse of blood in the middle of his gut. He takes two more steps and then his feet go out from under him when another hard hit numbs his shoulder. His breath leaves him in a hard gasp that ends in a moan - and he can see Natasha's eyes leave her target and focus on him.

He's propping himself half up against a concrete piling, shield dragging down his left side. He can only see the back of Steve's head now, can see dust kick up when the machine gun gets going, taking out the men to Steve's left and right. Things blur confusingly and he's not sure who they're firing at. Who the enemy is. "Sam," he says and tastes blood in his mouth. "Don't let them hurt Steve."

And then the world dims.


	8. Chapter 8

Steve only gets glimpses, fragments of the world outside his own body. Sometimes he can push and almost see out of his own eyes. Sometimes he feels like he could actually move his own fingers.

Most of the time, he is in the dark, pressed down and suffocating. He tries to drift. Bucky is there often, smoothing his hair across his forehead and holding his hand and telling him to be strong. He knows Bucky isn’t there, this is just the concoction of a sweating, terrified mind - but he takes comfort all the same.

He has no idea how much time has passed. Sometimes he thinks it’s been hours - sometimes he thinks it’s been years. He thinks of Bucky living under Hydra for 70 years and wonders if it’s been 70 more. He wonders if Bucky is dead, if the world is gone, if Hydra has conquered the world. He has exchanged a prison cell of stone for a prison of his own his own bones and flesh.

There are flashes of color, bits of reality that seep through the darkness. Sometimes, it’s as if whatever is controlling his eyes gets tired and he has a second to flick his gaze back and forth before he is shuttled back into stillness. He sees planes in a hangar, red light coming from thick weapons, maps that show the whole world. Armed troops march before his gaze, stand at attention in large rooms. They’re planning something. He hears, “Hail Hydra!” and hears his own voice echo it back.

He can see Rumlow’s twisted face, scarred mouth locked in its grimace of rage. Sometimes his body paces up and down the hallways, the rhythm hurting his head and making his teeth grind.

Whatever is in him, he knows it’s powerful. The prickling rises and swells like thick waves of lava, hot and unbearable. He can feel something insubstantial pushing at the inside of his skin, like whatever is in him is working hard at keeping itself contained inside Steve’s narrow body and can’t quite manage. The heat seems to sizzle inside of him - and yet his arms and legs are cold like the squeeze in his middle has cut off the blood flow to his extremities.

Sometimes the presence talks to him. Taunts him, really.

“What do you think will happen when we stand before your friends? Do you think they will have the courage to kill you? Or will they hesitate long enough for me to end them?”

“You are the best of mankind and you are barely sufficient. You are flimsy and breakable. You are weak and I could crush you. Rumlow says you were a god. You are a child. You are making me weaker by forcing me to stay in this skin.” The creature pulses and Steve shudders as his bones bend.

Good, Steve thinks. Good. I am glad that I am not sufficient. I am glad I make you weak. I hope they kill you.

He can feel the growing weakness in his own body too, though. In the beginning, his limbs had been strong and flexible and the alien’s efforts to use them had been hampered more by its own inability to walk on two legs and less Steve’s efforts. Now, though, Steve can feel that his limbs are losing their vitality, the muscle and bone taxed to the breaking point under the powerful lock of the parasite. His lungs feel like they did when he had asthma, soupy and heavy like stones in his chest. His heart hurts, a deep ache that burns against his breastbone, squeezing until he feels like it will pop out of his chest.

“We will kill your friends,” the thing in his head whispers, dark and slimy and insidious. “Perhaps I will let you watch as we raze your country. As we burn the children and tear down the buildings. We will tear your precious flag to shreds and slice all you love to the ground.”

Please, he thinks, if I am to die, let me take this creature with me. But his body drags on, weak and in pain.

Then, one day, Steve feels the alien thrum, as if in excitement. His own body aches with the movement.

“Unfortunately,” the parasite says in his head. “Your mindless nattering thoughts cannot distract me for this next part. When your friends are kneeling before me, I will allow you a chance to say goodbye.”

 

* * *

 

When Natasha finally lands back at Stark Towers and watches the medical team wheel Barnes away with Sam following, she feels a deep weariness through every single of her own bones. She’s carrying the shield, holds it tight against her like a promise.

There's grit caked onto her hair and skin and shallow wound wrapped around her left side where a piece of exploding concrete had hit her. But even as she chugs a bottle of water and sits at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, she wonders if she should be back out there.

It had been a brief but bloody struggle after Barnes had fallen. Sam had swooped in and carried him out and, almost simultaneously, more of the strange jets had started landing, spewing helmeted Hydra soldiers onto the lawn. There had been too many and there hadn't been time to worry about James.

The marines on the steps hasn't stood a chance against them. Steve's initial squad had cut through them like butter and the last Natasha had seen of him was his blonde head disappearing into the Capitol.

Reinforcements had arrived then, from Fort Meade, and they'd managed to get a ring of barricades up around the Capitol and contain the fighting to inside of it. After a few brief skirmishes, Hydra had retreated into the Capitol and all had been quiet. When night had started falling, they had decided an assault on the Capitol in the dark wasn't a good idea.

Sam had called and said he has taken Barnes to the hospital in Georgetown - the bullet in his middle had gone straight through without any major damage and James was already healing, though he was still unconscious.

Generals from the Pentagon had arrived and there had been a call with the SHOC and the President and they'd decided to stand down, but hold the perimeter, until morning. So Tony and Natasha had left, leaving Rhodey behind to keep an eye on things, while they picked up Sam and Barnes from Georgetown and got back to Manhattan. Barnes was still out of it and resting in medical but the serum looked like it was in overdrive. When Natasha has peeked at his shoulder underneath the bandages, the wound had looked days old.

She wasn't sure if they had made the right choice, leaving the Capitol with Steve still inside and a target on his back.

"Hydra did something to him," was the first thing she had said when a SHOC agent had brought up Steve's presence. "He wouldn't..."

"We had him in prison for a reason," one of the generals had said. "Who knows what-"

"This isn't Steve," she had repeated. "We know Hydra has brainwashing and reprogramming capabilities. You were the ones that handed him over. God knows what they did to him."

"Let's not point fingers," another one of the SHOC officials had said. "What's done is done. We'll deal with Captain Rogers when this is all over."

But she had a sinking suspicion that they would not be trying to take him alive. The idea that Captain America had orchestrated all of this? Had tricked all of them? Had turned so wholly against his country? At the very least, it wasn't good publicity.

She was afraid that she and Stark, and all of the people who knew Steve, were being pushed from the front lines so that this could be taken care of as smoothly and ruthlessly as possible - before too much of the public knew he was even still walking around. Steve would be shot in the head and maybe it would be all ultimately blamed on Hydra programming - just so they wouldn't have to face tearing down the monument that they had just put up. But they wouldn’t take him alive - wouldn’t want to take the chance that they had made this big a mistake.

"Natasha," Tony's voice was urgent. He comes into the kitchen and his face is still streaked with dirt and he's holding one of his tablets. He hits a button and the flat panel over one wall turns on.

It's not the clearest picture - but it's obviously taken in the House of Representatives. The camera is back in the balcony and Natasha can see black helmets sitting in the seats normally occupied by congressional representatives.

For a moment, her brain refuses to process who's sitting in the Speaker's spot. It's just a dark smudge - she leans closer and the picture coalesces.

Brock Rumlow, scarred and smiling, is standing in the US Capitol. The red tattoo of a skull on his face is shining dully in the overheads. He's talking and Natasha gets a chill down her spine. This is a madman. He's a ranting about power and worship and being a god.

"You had a god in your midst," he says the camera, voice sharp and cruel, "and you betrayed him. You burned him. You forgot about him. You abused him. And, now, he and I will conquer as gods together. We will rule earth. We will unite the countries. You will call me Crossbones. There will be no war. No famine. There will be order and obedience. And we will lead you. Hail Hydra."

"Hail Hydra!" the audience echoes.

"Hail Hydra," Steve Rogers says and steps up next to the Brock Rumlow. The red hydra on his chest is practically glowing.

Up close and under the artifices lights, he's almost gray, looking impossibly worse than he did that say on the plane to Greenland. His hair is limp and colorless and his skin is pulled tight around his face like he too has a twisted face just waiting to burst free. And his eyes are black. Natasha had thought she had seen that earlier on the steps of he Capitol - but she hadn't been sure. Now there's no denying, Steve's irises are gone, swallowed whole by his pupils, until all that's left is a thin rim of white on either side. It makes him look almost reptilian.

"What did they do to him?" she asks, feeling like a child.

"I don't know," Tony says, his face is set in stone. "But I'm going to find out."

 

* * *

 

Sam knows he needs to there when Bucky wakes up. He needs to make sure of it. The doctors and nurses try to get him to leave - but they’re in the special facility at Stark Tower so this isn’t some regular hospital where they can make him get out. And Bucky isn't critical - the wound was messy and bloody but it hadn't hit anything vital, thanks to Bucky's body armor. It's healing fast and he has a feeling Bucky's going to be trying to get up the second he wakes. So, he plants his butt in an ergonomically designed, but still plush, chair in between a panoramic window and a hospital bed that looks like something out of Star Trek, and waits and tries not to think of Steve's black eyes.

The steady beeping and the white sheets remind him of the hospital, years ago, just outside of D.C., when he had sat in a hard chair and waited for Steve to wake up while the Triskelion was still burning to the ground. He’d known Steve for less than two weeks then. Of course, he’d known Captain America his whole childhood. There had never been any question, not since Sam was six and watching cartoons of the Howling Commandos storm through Europe, that Sam Wilson would follow Captain America into battle, death, and beyond.

Then, in the months that followed, he’d started following Steve Rogers. During those last awful days before Steve had taken the plea bargain, when Steve had been pale and hollow eyed and Bucky had been two shades of desperate crazy, he'd told himself that all of it had been for Steve. No matter how wary he'd been of Bucky, he'd known that he would stand by Bucky because Steve (stalwart, strong, good Steve) believed in him. And that had been enough.

And then Steve had been locked away, punished for crimes he didn't commit in the name of loyalty. Sam couldn't have shit all over that sacrifice by abandoning Bucky Barnes - even if he had wanted to.

That morning, the last day of his freedom, Steve had left from the cabin before dawn and made both him and Natasha swear to get Bucky back on his feet - not only to see him safe, but to see him whole. It had been a hefty promise - one that Sam had sworn to but had honestly second guessed his own ability to fulfill.

At first, Bucky had been angry and quiet. He'd locked himself in his room like Sam's surly teenage nephews, barely even coming to the common areas for meals or the gyms for training. He would talk to Natasha, quiet conversations so that no one else could hear. He'd gone to the therapist that Tony had sent up - but the sessions seemed to be as unproductive as everything else. Then, Tony had hacked the feed and Steve had ended up in the infirmary. Sam had been the one to tell him and he'd taken it stoically, eyes growing red rimmed but no tears falling. But when Steve had at last been returned to his cell, Bucky had shown up at Sam's door.

"I need to know," he had said, "how to take care of Steve once he's out." His voice has been firm, hair pulled up off his face. "I was reading on the Internet - solitary can screw with a man's mind. And I want to be able to help him."

Sam had specialized in combat veterans and prisoners of war. Being locked inside a supermax by your own government so you could save your friends? That felt like it needed a whole degree of its own. "We'll learn together," he'd told him.

That had been the turning point. As the months had crawled by, Sam had gotten to see glimpses of the man in the history books and museum displays - the Bucky Barnes that had his own teddy bear and smiled fondly at Steve Rogers in black and white footage. He was kind and thoughtful and brave.

Sam had always known how Steve's goodness inspired devotion in his team - but he'd started understanding how Bucky had inspired that same devotion in Steve.

So, now, he sits in Stark’s fancy hospital and waits for Bucky to wake up because it’s what Steve would’ve done and it’s what Sam Wilson did for his friends.

When Bucky had fallen, the green of the National Mall had merged with the white snowy field of Greenland and Steve hitting the snow and Sam being unable to reach him. His stomach has plummeted dizzily and he'd managed to curl up and dive bomb toward the concrete piling where Bucky was still propped only seconds after he heard Bucky’s mumble across the comms.

He'd carried Bucky from the battlefield himself, feeling blood soak down the front of his flight suit and yelling at him to wake up, wake up. There had been a detour to Georgetown to pack the wound - but they were already getting casualties from Capitol Hill and Barnes' serum was already pushing the bullets out and knitting flesh together. The doctors had been at a loss on what to do. They’d taken a scan and confirmed nothing vital had been hit and disinfected both wounds.

“He’s asleep,” the doctors had told Sam. “But these wounds look days old and not hours. He’ll be fine soon.”

Natasha and Stark had landed on the roof with the quinjet and they'd landed at Stark tower in time for a late dinner. They’d taken Bucky down to this fancy infirmary and set him up with fluids and warm blankets and said that it was just a matter of time.

It’s ticking past 10 pm when Bucky begins to stir.

"Hey, man," Sam says softly, because he's done this for too many soldiers than he cares to count. "You're in New York. You're safe."

Bucky licks his lips and his eyes flicker to Sam and then the ceiling. "Steve was. He was at the Capitol?"

"He was."

"Is he okay?" Bucky pushed himself up, hand fisting to white knuckles in the sheet. "Hydra must've done something..."

He's not going to get any more rest, Sam knows. There's a wheelchair in the corner of the room, along with sweats in Bucky's size. "He's alive. Stark has some intel. If you get dressed and ride in the nice wheelchair, I'll even let you hear it."

Bucky isn't much help in pulling the pants or shirt on, each movement makes him grunt and hiss and hold his breath like he's concentrating very hard.

"We don't have to do this now," Sam says. "We can take care of this if..."

"Nope," Bucky pushes himself into the wheelchair and breathes shallowly for a second. "Nope. I'm good. Let's do this. I'll be right as rain in a couple hours.”

He's probably right. Goddamned super soldiers and their super healing that makes them think they're invincible.

It's just Natasha and Tony in the lab. Earlier, when they had just arrived back, there had been government techs and liaisons and weary agents from all number of agencies. But it was late now and most of them had left for the night.

Tony was tapping a stylus on a screen when they came in and he swayed just a little on his feet when he turned to greet them. "Did you tell him?" he asks with preamble.

Sam shakes his head.

“Well, then, roll footage.” Tony flourishes and the recording from inside the Capitol plays again. Brock Rumlow ranting and calling himself Crossbones and the rows filled with Hydra’s soldiers. At the end, when Steve steps into the light with his black eyes and gray skin and says the words, Sam looks at Bucky and Bucky has his arms folded about his middle like he’s holding something deep inside.

Tony flicks off the tape. ”Great. Okay. All up to speed. So here is the rest. It's not brainwashing. Not like with you."

Sam's watching Bucky: his shoulders sag while his mouth twists, relief and fear.

"You're not telling me he's doing this of his own free will."

"Nope. I think our Captain has picked up some sort of a parasite." Tony moves his stylus sharply and whirl of data goes up.

It's Steve: Steve by the numbers. His heart rate and blood pressure and body temperate all scroll across the screen in blue boxes. All of it is ringing an infrared scan of Steve that Tony must've taken during the battle. It's dark gray except for something bulbous and burning red and hot in Steve's middle. Strange tentacles are extending out from it and winding up the center of Steve's body to his head and arms and legs. It looks like a giant spiderweb. Or, Sam realizes sickly a second later, the many legs of an octopus.

"Whatever it is," Tony says, "it's wrapped itself around Steve's spinal cord and most of his major organs. His heart rate right now is about 10 beats per minute. His blood pressure is non existent. He's taking one breath about every twenty seconds and his body temperature is corpse level. The only heat seems to be generated by this thing." He taps the center of the red blob on the screen.

"Is he alive?" Bucky asks, hushed.

Sam thinks of Steve walking across the ice and the red glow hitting the back of his head, looks at his friend's body now, twisted in the red grasp of Hydra and thinks that it might be better if he weren't.

"They used some sort of localized EMP that was undetectable to my sensors to knock out his trackers. Or it could just have been a side effect of however they ended up transporting themselves out of there and the trackers were just a nifty side benefit.” Tony circles a couple of the dark areas on Steve. "I found them, here and here - both completely dead. My last one, here, didn't get knocked out but they must've been keeping him somewhere that blocked the signal, so it wasn't connecting. When it came back online, I was getting readings like these - but I just assumed..." Tony trails off and then rallies. "Look. With readings like these, he should be dead. But, when I take a look at his brain scans, and mind you, these aren't great or completely accurate - but it looks like he's dreaming. I think the parasite put him into a coma of sorts." He pauses again. "I don't think he's in any pain," he offers at last. "I don't think he's feeling anything."

Bucky puts his fist to his mouth, presses deep and closes his eyes. It looks like a cross between a prayer and the greatest pain a man can bear and stay standing. His shoulders shake once, hard, like something deep inside has unlocked. "Thank you," he rasps, "for not giving up on him."

Tony flinches, eyes going to the ground. "You know I wouldn't have..."

"But a lot of people did," Bucky cuts him off. "So thank you." He looks around the room. "All of you. I wouldn't have... Steve..." He swallows, throat working, and then moves forward. "Okay. What's the plan then? What did SHOC say?"

Tony’s jaw goes tight. ”I presented them all this data and they agree that Steve has been compromised. But they don't think it merits any special consideration at this point," his last words go up like he's mimicking someone. He looks down. “Right now, there’s some sort of energy field surrounding the Capitol that’s creating a shield. It’s preventing any missiles or bullets to penetrate. You can walk through it - but you can’t fire a gun from one side to the other. Last I heard, they thought they had figured out where the shield was being powered from, inside the building. They’ve schedule an elite strike mission for dawn to go in and take it out, Then, they’ve scheduled an air to ground missile strike for 0900 tomorrow. Drop at least three Patriot missiles on the Capitol. Nothing's going to be left but dust."

"So we have to get Steve out before then." Sam folds his arms across his chest.

"We're not authorized," Natasha says. Her voice has no inflection and her eyes give nothing away. "SHOC has said we're not to get involved."

"Oh, c'mon," Sam can't stop himself. "And we're going to give up? We're going to abandon him? You're going to let him die again?"

"We're not going to let him die," Tony snaps back. "We just have to be tricky. We have about seven hours before the sun comes up and we have to get it done before then."

"If what you say is true," Bucky says quietly, "he isn't going to come easily. Whatever is in him, it’s going to fight back. And it’s inside Steve. We can’t kill it without killing him.”

Tony looks at Natasha and it makes something heavy settle in Sam's gut.

"What?" he asks.

Tony grimaces. "When everything was...happening, I made something that I hoped never to need to use. The Pentagon wanted something that would be able to take Steve, or you," he says, looking at Bucky, "out. So I made them something."

He goes to his work bench and pulls out a hefty looking gun. It has thick tubes filled with a blue liquid lining the side and the muzzle is flared like a vacuum. Tony cradles it in one arm.

"The working title was Freeze Ray - hold the jokes, people. Based on the plane, we know that extreme cold can force Steve's body into a state of hibernation. This gun triggers that same chemical process at the cellular level of the body, inducing an extreme state of hypothermia almost instantly. Give it a few minutes and it drops core body temperature so low that a normal human would die. With Steve, it should just drop him into hibernation. Just like he was when he was on the plane.”

"But you said he's basically already in a coma? If the creature can use Steve’s body would this even make a difference?” Sam stares at the gun and wonders at what point Tony would've ever told them about it had Steve stayed in prison. Or stayed dead. Also, “Freeze Ray” makes him think of kiddie cartoons and psycho villains. Some days, his life just gets even more ridiculous.

"He is - but my guess is that the parasite won’t like its core body temperate dropping blowing freezing. Right now, like I said, it’s body temperature is well above a normal human’s - and since it’s twisted around Steve’s body, this should freeze the thing as much as it freezes Steve.” He shrugs. "It's a guess but I think it’s our best way to try and kill the thing without putting a bunch of bullets through Steve.”

"So this will what? Freeze him? Like the plane and Hydra did to me? And then we just cart him out of there and wake him up?" Bucky is out of the wheelchair now, leaning across the table, he bites the corner of his lip and for a moment he looks very young. "What's the range?"

"We need to be within fifteen feet. And, yeah, that's the plan. Either the process will kill the parasite, or it'll give us time to figure out a way to remove it. I have a, well, ice chest we can use to transport him in - get him back here or to Cho. Between us, we should be able to get it out of him.” He spreads his hands . "It's a gamble but I'm not sure if we have any better options."

Sam's head is hurting, a dull pounding at the back. But there's also something hopeful in his chest. They've gambled with worse odds and less of a plan before and come out okay. "So we fly to D.C., sneak past the US military, sneak into the Hydra infested Capitol, and a freaky Brock Rumlow calling himself Crossbones, shoot Captain America with a freeze ray, and sneak him out all before a missile blows up the whole shebang in the morning?"

"Well. I didn't say it was a perfect plan." Tony looks down at the gun in his hands. "But yeah."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more chapters to go! Thank you for all your feedback :)


	9. Chapter 9

In Bucky’s opinion, the plan does end up being fairly straightforward. They fly the quinjet to just outside Bethesda, hide it as best they can, and then Sam flies Bucky in to D.C., Bucky hooked to him like a fish on a wire via a slim harness. Stark goes on ahead, with a quick salute as he goes, and Natasha stays with the quinjet.

“You know, you’re always heavier than you look,” Sam gripes quietly as they slip through the dark night over D.C.. "I feel like a pack mule."

It’s almost four am. The area around the Capitol has all been evacuated and the streets are pitch black and vacant, except for the occasional burst of color from the lights of a passing cop car. The moon is thin and watery - when they fly over the Potomac, it’s just a hint of silver reflecting the moonlight.

Sam stays low, just above the rooftops, and they keep utterly silent. Bucky has the freeze ray gun strapped to his back. The shield, though, is waiting back at the quinjet. He loves Steve’s shield as much as a man can love a weapon - but tonight, he’s aiming for a body count.

His middle, where the shot had hit, is a dull throb that tugs at the edges of consciousness. He's good at ignoring pain. The closer they get, Bucky allows himself to steady, to calm, to drain all the distractions and emotions from his mind and just focus on what he has to do. He can’t afford any weakness.

Bucky's goggles are projecting floor map of the Capitol with Steve as a little green dot. He’s been staying in the upper right hand side of the building, flitting in between the offices there. The plan is come in through the window of an empty room, move through the hallway until the reach Steve, hit Steve with the gun, grab him and get out of there as fast as they can.

Tony is coming in from the other side, planning on a little fireworks display that will occupy Hydra and the small army out front. His goal is to provide enough of a racket that everyone will be focused on the outside of the building while Sam and Bucky make the final descent from the side and hopefully, pull Steve out before anyone notices.

They have one shot at this. It's getting close to dawn and there's no way this will work if they don’t have the cover of darkness to hide behind.

As they fly in close, buildings give away to the National Mall and the dark hulking shell of the Capitol.

“One minute,” he breathes over the comms and hears Stark’s soft reply.

As they draw in close so that he can almost pick out the individual shapes of the troops on the ground, Bucky hears a high snap-pop sound and a crackle that sounds like a transmitter coming online.

"Here we go," Sam says above him and they swoop around to the side.

From somewhere, or maybe everywhere, horns start playing a familiar tune as Tony’s distraction begins.

And, even with the last weeks pressing on him, Bucky feels a smile tug.

Sam snorts. "Of course he did."

"Who's strong and brave and here to save the American way?" a choir sings, loud enough to echo off the neighboring buildings, coming from some speaker that no one can see. "Who vows to fight like a man for what's right night and day?"

By the end of the first line, fireworks are exploding in the sky. Red, white and blue are all bursting together and raining down thick sparks.

Bucky checks the green dot on his goggles, looking for an empty room near where Steve is. "Second floor, two windows down." His ears are peeled for the sound of someone calling out that they've spotted them but everyone's attention seems to be on the display. He pulls up the little device Stark had given him. "This better work."

"Three, two, one."

Bucky points the device at the window and pulls the trigger. A blue beam shoots out and engulfs the window. He unclips his harness, tucks his body into a roll, and swings himself forward. He goes through the window without a sound, glass melting around him like butter. He hits the plush carpet and rolls forward, bringing his automatic up as he gains his feet. The room is empty like he thought it would be. He looks back at the window and there's a silvery puddle where the glass use to be. "Nice."

Sam comes in a moment later, wings tucking in behind him. "We're in," he says, softly, into the comms. And then to Bucky, "where to?"

He checks the map again. There are heat signatures just beyond the door, four of them, and then ten yards of hallway, and then Steve with six other heat signatures around him. There’s a cluster of twenty heat signatures further down - their goal will be to not attract their attention. He hand signals the door and Wilson takes the other side. Just on the other side of the door, he can hear muffled talking underneath the percussion of Star Spangled Man with a Plan.

He counts down with his fingers. Three, two, one.

He goes first, slides the door open and comes out quiet.

The first guard is within reach and he snaps his neck with a quick flick of his wrists. The second one turns and Bucky's knife ends up buried in his throat. He yanks it out and turns to find Sam standing over the last one, the other one lying a couple feet away with a neat bullet hole in his head.

“Four guards down," he tells the comms, wiping the blade off. "Proceeding to the target. Be ready."

The hallway is dark, the only light coming from the fireworks crackling outside the windows. He can hear voices, up ahead down a slight bend in the hallway and behind the doors. The thick carpets muffle their footsteps. There's a light shining in the crack at the bottom of one of the doors. The room that Steve is in.

He pulls the freeze ray gun out and drops the safety off.

Three. Two. One.

He tests the knob and it turns easily in his hand. He pushes in, flings it to the side, going high through the doorway while Sam covers him, going low.

The six men around the table look up. He drops two with head shots from the automatic that he pulls up in his metal hand.

"Well well," says a voice to his left, in a dim corner by a bookcase.

He sees a flash of blonde and pulls Stark’s freeze ray up.

Steve is standing there, with those black eyes, and he's smiling like he's happy to see Bucky. "What do you intend to do with that, Sergeant Barnes? I know you do not want to hurt your friend." His voice is flat, inflection burned away into monotone.

The lamp shatters behind them and the room goes into darkness, lighting up in red, white and blue from the fireworks.

Bucky pulls the trigger, not letting himself rethink or hesitate. It feels like a shockwave when the gun goes off. The air shimmers like a heat rising off of a hot car in summer, ripples toward Steve like a flood, the edges frothed white. Behind him, Bucky can hear Sam fighting the other men, can hear the fireworks going off and hear the choir singing "We can’t ignore there’s a threat and a war we must win..."

But he's watching Steve. The thing wearing Steve's body.

The blast hits Steve and he staggers back a step, his back hitting the bookshelf. His face goes white with shock and it makes a pang go through Bucky.

"What did you do?" Steve asks, in that same unsurprised, unmoved tone. His face is pales rapidly and his legs go out a second later. He slides to the floor like doll thrown against a wall, hands open and palms up. His entire body starts shuddering, giant throbs that make his upper body jerk in a parody of laughter. "You'll be sorry," Steve's mouth gasps around heaves. "You'll be sorry. There will be nothing left of your friend. You have not killed me. I will find a new host. You take this head and I will find another. I made the world dark. I have more power than you can dream. You cannot stop me. You have just succeeded in killing your captain."

Bucky says nothing but he holds the gun steady. He can see Steve's fingers turning white like ice, legs jerking as he tries to get up, but can't.

Behind him, he can hear Sam come and stop beside him. Outside, the song plays on and the fireworks reflect off the window. “Who’ll rise or fall…give his all for America…”

Steve's body contorts, horribly, and then there's a shrieking noise that seems to come from his belly. Something jerks upward like he's been punched from the inside and then there's a torrent of thick red blood and black slime. Something dark and slithery crawls from his belly, squirming and dying.

Whatever it is, it's leaking oil behind it and red smoke is puffing up from what Bucky thinks are nostrils. It's yellow eyes are in slits, darting around. It opens its mouth and there's a row of teeth, sharp and yellow.

"One of you," it says - but it's mouth doesn't move and Bucky feels the words beating against the inside of his forehead, "will make an excellent host."

It lunges for Bucky, oily slime and red smoke lifting off the floor, and Sam fires his gun, once, twice, four times.

The bullets throw it off course and it hits a lamp on a side table. It crashes to the floor with a shriek that makes Bucky's head throb. Then it moves again (slower, though, like it's injured) and it's going for Bucky's face. He drops the freeze ray gun and gets up his knife just in time.

Something cold and slick touches his chin and he jerks the knife upward, twisting it. He can’t see anything, between the blackness of the room and the darkness of the creature. He can feel something scraping at his cheeks, at his forehead, pulling at the skin. The blade hits something hard, skitters and bounces, as the pressure on his face grows. And then, the knife slides in, smooth as butter. Wetness splatters and he shuts his eyes, feeling it streak across his cheeks, and there's another scream inside his head.

The thing drops to the floor, puddles and congeals like something rotten. Horrible moaning pounds against Bucky's skull once more. The creature is still moving, gaining it’s feet, getting up. He drops to one knee, grabs the freeze ray gun, points, and pulls the trigger. The icy blast is only a couple feet from its target this time and the rippling wave makes the thing squeal and buck. It shrieks again, writhing sharply, and Sam shoots it with his gun once more. The thing falls silent and all Bucky can hear is the song and the fireworks and something dripping.

"What in the hell was that?" Sam says breathlessly. He sounds shaken and he’s still holding his gun on the carcass.

But Bucky can't answer. His gaze is fixed on Steve, still lying against the bookshelves.

"Steve," he says, darting over and kneeling next to him. "Sam, we gotta get ready to move." He touches Steve's middle, feels the sopped fabric of the black uniform, then rests his hand on Steve's cheek. The skin is freezing. "Steve. Steve. C'mon. Answer me."

Vaguely, he can hear Sam in his earpiece, explaining what's happening. They need to evac, now.

Steve's head rolls once and then his eyes crack open, bright blue like he's 21 and has the fever. "Buck," he murmurs and something black and viscous is trailing out the corner of his mouth. He’s shivering.

"Yep. It's me. I'm here. Just hang on a second." He hesitates a moment and then pulls up the black shirt. There's a crater in Steve's belly, dark and glistening in the dim light of the room. His hands flutter, wanting to apply pressure but unsure where to even start. "Stark," he barks over the comms. "He's not gonna make it."

"Okay, listen. I think the heat of the creature kept him from fully freezing," Stark sounds rattled. "Or I had the settings wrong. Whatever. We've never tried it before. His core body temp needs to go down another 25 degrees before it'll enter stasis mode. You'll need to hit him again."

"What?" Bucky snaps back, echoed by Sam.

"You get him frozen, he won't die. You'll have time to get him out. It's our only chance."

He's not wrong.

Steve's blinking slowly, eyes not focusing. "'M cold," he says, mouth barely moving. "Bucky, 'm cold. Hurts."

"Sam," Bucky says over his shoulder. "Get me the gun." Then to Steve, "just one second, sweetheart, okay? One more second."

Sam presses the gun into his hand and Bucky keeps it low, out of Steve's sight line.

"I love you," he says to Steve, leaning close and brushing a kiss to the side of his mouth. "It'll be okay. Just hold on a few more seconds for me. Can you feel my hand? I’m here, don’t forget that.”

Steve is looking past him, eyes drifting to something only he can see. "'s'okay," he echoes. "Gotta see you. 's'okay." He coughs again and his breath whistles heavily.

It’s now or never.

Bucky settles him back against the bookshelf, passes a hand over his forehead like he can smooth out the pained wrinkles with his touch alone. "It's okay, Steve, just stay still,” he says when Steve makes a motion like he's going to get up and try and follow him. “I'm right here." He backs up six paces, takes a deep breath and prays, and fires the gun. As soon as he pulls the trigger and sees the shimmery blur head toward Steve again, he drops the gun. "Get the wrappings,” he barks and drops to his knees next to Steve again.

Steve's body is twitching spastically with the aftershocks of the blast and his eyes don't move when Bucky says his name. His mouth gapes open, like he can’t get any air. Then, at last, the twitching fades and Steve's eyes slide shut and Tony's voice sounds over the comms, "he's down."

Bucky can’t feel a pulse, can’t feel any breath.

They move quickly then, get Steve wrapped up in the protective coverings - it's nothing more than a thick tarp really, designed to keep Steve safe during the flight back to the quinjet.

"Okay, we're ready for pick up," Sam says.

Bucky brushes a hand over Steve's head. His hair still feels soft even when his skin feels like cold marble. He's white like snow, unmoving. Bucky imagines this is what he looked like when they found him in the belly of that plane.

He's not dead, he reminds himself, almost hysterically. Only sleeping.

Tony’s voice is strained. “I’m incoming. Whatever you did, Terminator, it really worked. The energy field is down. We gotta get out of here before the troops outside take advantage and start firing the missiles early. They’re scurrying like ants down there trying to get something ready.”

The music crescendos and then there's shattering glass and Iron Man is hovering just above the floor, the brightest thing in the dark room.

"Let's blow this Popsicle stand," Stark says and scoops Steve up like he weighs nothing, flying back out the window as fast as he'd come.

Bucky clips his harness back on and Sam grabs the freeze ray gun, drops it into the holster on his back. He glances at the creature, still congealing on the floor, and wonders it they should take it as well. Then, outside, he hears shouts and the sounds of running footsteps down the hall. No time.

"Let's go."

They both run in tandem, leaping out the window just as the door to the room flies open. The horizon tilts and Bucky jerks as Sam's wings flip out and the harness pulls him upward.

In the east, the sky is beginning to pink up, just a little and Bucky can see the tanks and the army and the tents and all of Washington D.C. stretching before them. Stark was right, he can see the marines scrambling. When he looks over his shoulder, the early dawn light flashes against fighter jets, streaming toward the Capitol with their payloads.

They’re passing the Washington Monument when the sky flashes like a lightning strike and then an explosion ripples the air. It’s a windy heat on their backs. Sam sways and steadies. Bucky twists in his harness and sees a cloud of smoke and fire engulfing the Capitol. Another missile hits and a geyser of flame goes into the air, sparks showering like confetti. And that damned song is still playing. Bucky turns back around, watches the pink horizon begin to grow.

They did it.

Up ahead, Stark is a flash of red and gold, leading them home.

 

* * *

 

At the quinjet, they pack Steve's wounds with dressing, clean the blood and the black oily stuff off of him, and settle him in Stark’s ice chest - it’s a clear plastic box that reminds Bucky of a coffin.

"It'll make sure he stays frozen," Stark says. "We don't want to take any chances.

Steve looks dead. He's white and cold and completely unmoving.

"He's alive," Stark swears.

Bucky stares at the biometric monitors, the tiny blips that show Steve's heart barely beating. He settles into a chair nearby, trying to stay out of the way, but feeling a deep need to not let Steve out of his sight.

He lets the noises of Stark tapping away at the computer and the hum of the quinjet and the steady but infrequent beeps of Steve's monitors to lull him into a half doze.

He's on the Oregon coast with Steve. They're walking along a sandy shoreline, barefoot. There are pebbles and seashells and gritty piles of seaweed. The waves come up and lap at their feet and Steve is smiling. His blonde hair blows around his face in the salty breeze and he squeezes Bucky's fingers in his. There's a gull pinwheeling overhead. Ahead, Bucky can see their house, smoke rising from the chimney and the windows lit with a warm glow. Steve leans close and says something. The crashing waves drowned it out.

"What?" Bucky asks.

Steve leans close, their lips inches apart.

"Barnes!" Stark snaps.

Bucky opens his eyes.

The quinjet hums and Tony looks pale. "We have a problem."

Nothing is ever easy, Bucky thinks as he stares at the scans of Steve's insides a few minutes later. He feels choked and raw and exhausted.

Sam puts a hand on his shoulder.

Near as Tony can tell, the parasite alien creature thing had almost frozen to death inside Steve's body before escaping. It had been dying, fighting for its life, desperate to escape what was fast becoming its tomb. So it hadn't taken the time to retract the legs (roots? arms? vines? webbing?) that it had woven through Steve's body. Or maybe it just couldn’t retract them after they had been buried so deep and had cut them off in its escape. They would never know.

So the creature was gone, but dead parasitic limbs were still entangled in Steve's spinal cord, wrapped around his heart, pushed through his intestines, encircled about his stomach. They were ugly black things that twisted between the healthier pink of Steve's body, like a dead rosebush.

"What do we need to do?" Natasha asks and Bucky is grateful because it feels like his mouth won't work.

Stark looks rattled. “I sent the scans to Cho. She has some top notch surgeons at her facility. They’ll be able to do the best job.”

“Let’s go then,” Bucky says. He’s hoarser than he thought would be. He drifts over so he’s sitting next to the box again, staring down at Steve’s lips. They look frosted, like his breath froze on them.

Sam comes next to him, wraps two knuckles against the top. “He’ll be okay,” he says. He sounds like he means it but Sam always means things. He’s always positive and strong and steady and Bucky is staring down at Steve and thinking that he better savor staring at Steve’s face because soon it’ll be in the ground for real.

They land in South Korea in 12 hours. Natasha and Tony are on the phone with Washington, trying to explain how the force field around the Capitol had come down and why they aren’t in New York and why Steve wasn’t dead.

There’s a whole team of doctors waiting, white coated and stony faced. They load the glass box onto a stretcher and Bucky and Sam follow them out, wind whipping across the top of the building. They take Steve down a long white hallway and then through double doors and there’s a soft couch that they ask Bucky to wait on. Sam sits next to him and falls asleep seconds later, curled against the arm with his feet stretched onto the coffee table.

A few minutes later, Natasha comes and sits cross-legged in a chair. Her hair is tucked up in a pony tail and she stares out the window. She washed her face and she looks damp and exhausted. Bucky watches her, wonders what she’s thinking.

“I couldn’t have done this without you,” he says quietly, trying not to wake Sam.

Natasha faces him. Her eyes are wide like she’s seeing the last few weeks all at once, in a constant replay. “We should’ve saved him,” she whispers. “We should’ve…”

He reaches across and grabs her hand with his metal one. She stares down at his fingers. “Nat,” he says, warm, “we did.”

The first surgery at Cho's facility in South Korea is long and tedious and something that Bucky never wants to go through again. He sits in the observation room, hands tucked under his thighs while Steve is laid bare under bright, white lights.

Steve's still in stasis and they use lasers to shear away the remaining tendrils of the parasite from around his internal organs. They lift out thick, black, stringy pieces of sludge and lay it in petri dishes for later study. They have to go fast - no one's ever operated on someone frozen like Steve is and even Tony's not sure if the stasis state will hold once he gets cut open and his insides are exposed to air.

Once the last pieces have been cleared from around Steve's heart and his middle is put back into one piece as best as they can manage, they close him up and return him to the glass box.

Bucky stares down and resolutely doesn't think about coffins.

The next day, they all stand outside the room where Steve is being lowered into a warm tank of saline solution.

"We have to rewarm him to his regular body temperature before we tackle the remaining bit around his brain stem," Cho explains. "I want to asses his cognitive abilities before we go in - see exactly what the webbing could be impairing. The serum should heal anything that has been damaged but I still want to be as careful as possible. Also, it will give us time to practice - get a clear map of what we’re dealing with so we don’t cause any unnecessary damage or trauma to the areas.”

When it’s over, Steve lays quietly in a clean, beautiful room with a sheet pulled up to his chest. He’s warm to the touch now and breathing steadily.

Bucky gets to sit next to him, hold his hand. The hours tick by and when the nurse comes to pull back the sheet on the nightly rounds, there’s nothing but a little pink pucker where the gaping hole in Steve’s middle had been. He’s getting better.

They get word from D.C. that Brock Rumlow’s body has been found in the ruins of the Capitol building and Bucky closes his eyes and is only a little sorry that he didn’t get to do the honors himself.

Three days later, Bucky’s dozing in his chair when alarms start blaring and Steve is seizing on the bed. His limbs jerk and and twist and Bucky throws himself across the bed, trying to keep Steve from knocking himself onto the floor. He can hear personnel coming in behind him and he braces his knees, uses his hands to hold Steve’s head steady.

“Steve. Steve. It’s okay. Just hold on.”

When the seizure stops, Bucky feels wrung out and sick. He slides to the floor, against the wall, sits with his knees up to his chest and thinks please, please, please, please. He tries to stay quiet and still as what seems like dozens of people bustle around Steve’s bed, so many that he can’t even see Steve sometimes.

Sam comes in at some point, sits next to him. He doesn’t say anything but Bucky can feel him trembling just a little.

Helen comes and talks to them, sits with them on the floor cross-legged with her back straight and her eyes kind. The serum is back up to full form, which is good. Except it’s attacking the remaining parasitic tendrils all on its own. It’s not a fight the serum can win on its own and there’s a real danger of Steve’s brain stem being the casualty in the war. They wanted - needed - more time to prepare, but there’s no time left. Doing the surgery now means risks of brain death and loss of motor function and a whole list of other things that Bucky blurred from his mind because he couldn’t stand it. Not doing the surgery now means Steve could die. They’ll operate in the morning.

Bucky slides into the narrow bed next to Steve that night, wraps his arms around him and tries to not cry on his shoulder. He listens to his steady heart beat, feels his warm breath against his cheek. “Whatever happens,” he whispers to Steve in the dark room, “it’ll be okay. This is more than… this is more than enough.”

Now, at least, Steve is warm and safe and among friends and Bucky can hold him tight through whatever comes next.

Bucky stays with Steve until the surgical team had come to take him away the next morning. Sam comes with coffee and Natasha brings a box of donuts back with her from New York. They all sit together in silence until Steve is ready to be pushed into the hallway. Natasha touches his forehead and Sam pats his chest. Only Bucky goes with him toward the operating room. He holds Steve’s hand as they walk down the white, clean hallways. At the door of the operating room, he bends and kisses his forehead, brushes his hair back, and says, “I’ll see you soon,” because anything else hurts too much.

This second surgery is harder and longer than the first. Bucky and Sam pace on the roof together - the blue sky makes them feel less caged. Tony is in D.C. with Rhodey and Wanda, planning an air assault on the North Pole base that they had tracked the planes back to - he’s calling Sam constantly for updates and Bucky would be annoyed except his face is so earnest every single time. Natasha sits in the waiting room, still and quiet.

When Steve is wheeled back into his room, his head is shaved and he looks vulnerable. Bucky runs his hand over his head and thinks that he’s never seen Steve’s hair like this, never seen the exact shape of his skull. He cups the back, feels the thick stitches and presses a kiss to the crown, the soft bristles tickling his lips.

Helen says the surgery went as well as it could. All the remaining parasitic limbs are gone. The damage left behind is what they had expected - now it’s just a waiting game to see how much Steve’s serum can heal and how fast.

Stark comes two days later, carrying a large envelope. He stands in the recovery room and stares down at Steve and won't sit down when Bucky offers him a chair. "I just got this," he says, waving the envelope, "from the warden at the prison. Steve wrote us all letters. When he found out." He stops and pulls out one, just notebook paper folded into a third with Steve's scrawl along the front, and drops it on the table. "For when you want it."

"Thank you," Bucky says, but he doesn't reach for it.

Stark clears his throat. "They're sending over all his personal things. I'm having it all sent to Stark Tower. Unless..."

Bucky thinks of running with Steve, taking him away to a place where no one knew their names and no one knew how to find them. He looks at the letters and Steve and Tony's pinched face. "Oregon," he says at last. "I got a house for us. Lots of windows. It'll be perfect for him."

Tony nods. "You got an address? I can make sure it's all set up for when you guys get there."

Bucky imagines the sex swing and the hot tub Stark will set up and he smiles. "Yeah. I can give you that,” he says and lets himself feel grateful.

Steve opens his eyes the next morning. Or rather, Bucky looks up and realized Steve's eyes are open, staring blankly ahead out the window.

"Steve?" he asks, voice just above a whisper.

Steve’s eyes are fixed straight ahead and he doesn’t answer.

Bucky grabs his hand, wraps their fingers together and squeezes. "Hey, Steve, can you look at me?"

His fingers don't grip back. His face doesn't change. He blinks slow and quiet, like he's still somewhere lost in a dream - like he's still not really back with Bucky.

Bucky presses a kiss to his palm and says, "I'm here."

The doctors tell him that Steve’s brain is still healing, that they don’t understand the serum and how it fixes things and it could be awhile. They’re in uncharted territory.

Bucky sits on his hands and stares out the window. He makes promises to Steve. If you come back, I’ll… the list is endless.

In darker moments, he stares at the letter from Steve, still on the bedside table and can't bring himself to touch it. He doesn't want a letter. He doesn't want the last words from Steve to be on a page.

He thinks of the years that he barely remembers and the years that Steve was frozen. He thinks of sitting in his bed and watching Steve sleep behind bars, miles and miles away.

"We're so close, Steve," Bucky says, late at night. "Everything is almost okay again."

Then, one bright morning, Steve opens his eyes. And, this time, he says Bucky's name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go! I should have it up tomorrow :) I'd love to know your thoughts as this story winds up! And I really appreciate all the feedback I've gotten thus far.


	10. Chapter 10

Steve opens his eyes and blinks slowly in the mid morning sun. He can hear waves crashing against a sandy shore, a rushing, dragging rhythm, and Bucky humming, somewhere below him.

Out the window, blue ocean extends as far as the eye can see, eventually meeting with sky and puffy white clouds. In the corners, rolling green cliffs extend into the water like dark fingers. There’s no other houses on the cove, just theirs - nestled right in the center. He and Bucky own the property stretching down both sides of the coast - their nearest neighbor is ten miles away. So the view is just nature - trees and rocks and waves.

The window is one of the first thing he sees now, when he opens his eyes each morning. It helps on those days when reality feels too blurry to make out - when the crushing prison melds with a dark fortress or the belly of a plane or an expanse of years without Bucky. He can open his eyes and look out over the ever changing ocean, the clouds and the hills. It reminds him that he is far away from a dark cell.

He sits up slowly, feels his body stretch and pull with the change in position. Still in bed, he stretches forward, feels his back muscles extend as he reaches for his toes. He twists to the left, and then the right. His hands only have a little tremble in them this morning when he makes a fist. He presses his palms together, feels the tight muscles.

Then he swings his legs to the side and grabs the cane from where it's leaning against his bedside table. He plants his feet on the thick carpet and uses the support of the cane to lever himself up. His right leg gives a little in the knee and ankle, but he’s used to that now, and steadies himself easily.

It’s a beautiful cane: dark wood streaked with veins of something that almost looks gold in the right light. Tony had suggested something red, white and blue. But Steve had vetoed that one, much to Tony’s eternal displeasure. The handle is smooth and fitted perfectly to Steve’s grip and it doesn’t show the slightest bit of weakness when Steve leans his full weight against it. He’s grateful for the effort his friends took to find him the perfect cane. But he still despises its existence just a little.

The parasite burrowing in his insides would've killed a normal man, almost instantly. It's why Rumlow had been so desperate to get Steve, in particular, as a host. As it was, Steve had come very close to dying himself. He remembers the feeling of crushing weakness as the days with that creature inside of him had dragged on. He remembers the pain as the creature burst from him, being almost blind, just seeing the pale round of Bucky’s face bending close and thinking it was another hallucination. And, beyond that, he doesn't remember much until waking up in Dr. Cho's hospital after the surgeries.

His first clear memory of after (after the prison, after the snowy field, after a dark room with Bucky looking terrified above him) is seeing the sun reflecting a prism of rainbow colors on a clean white wall. He had watched the sun move across the wall for awhile and then, when he had turned his head finally, Bucky had been next to him, hand clenched around his, face lax in sleep. His head had been tipped sideways against the chair, mouth open as he snored softly. Steve remembers staring for a long time, just marveling at the way he could hear him breathe and the way metal fingers felt against his. After the years, just being in the same room with Bucky had been a luxury that Steve didn’t want to lose.

Finally, Bucky had twitched, mouth pursing. His hand had flexed around Steve’s and he’d blinked awake, yawning once. And then his eyes had locked onto Steve and his face had done something complicated. He leaned close, fingers stroking against the pad of Steve’s palm tenderly. “Hey, Steve,” he’d said, gentle and almost like he didn’t expect Steve to answer.

"Buck," Steve had whispered back, his throat and mouth feeling parched and unwieldy.

Bucky’s eyes had gone wide and he’d started crying then. He’d just put his head down on the bed next to Steve's side and cried in great gulps while Steve tried to get his arms to work so he could settle it on Bucky's shoulders.

"It's okay," he'd whispered, whole body feeling like a deadened lump.

Later, he had found out that he'd been in and out consciousness for a month. He'd found out that he'd almost died in surgery and that they'd been worried about brain death in the immediate aftermath. Natasha had told him that he'd woken up three times before he had said Bucky's name. The first two times, Steve hadn't responded and the third, he'd looked at Bucky but hadn't seemed able to speak. They'd been worried about how bad the brain damage was going to be and how fast it would heal.

In the end, some parts of his brain had fared better than others. By the third day, he wasn't slurring his words any longer and he could say the date and how he had gotten there and recount the time he'd spent in Rumlow’s fortress. He could remember what he ate for breakfast that morning, what Bucky was wearing, and could rattle off lists of objects that therapists showed him hours before.

Gross motor skills were another ball park.

The working theory was that because the alien parasite had needed to control his limbs to use Steve's body, his own muscle control had suffered the greatest amount of damage. Communication pathways between Steve’s brain and his limbs had been disrupted and broken and it was taking awhile for them to come back online.

It had taken Steve another month before he could hold a spoon. He'd been frustrated and angry at his helplessness. After years of being a prisoner and then being almost shoved out of his own body, he couldn't even feed himself? It had reminded of being small and sick and a burden on everyone around him. The feeling had soured in his gut.

Bucky, though, had taken to the situation like it was an old pair of gloves he'd just found again. He hadn't let Steve wallow, hadn't let him mope. He'd brought in thick protein shakes with straws so Steve wouldn't feel dependent and had teased him like it was 1941. He was unflaggingly positive, pushing Steve through each painful therapy session and each moment of embarrassing weakness. At night, when the muscles in his hands spasmed with pain and curled up into ugly claws, Bucky sat beside him and massaged his fingers for hours and hours. When Steve had told him to go sleep, he’d smiled. “This serum has got to be good for something, right?”

So, despite the humiliation and the endless therapy and tests, Bucky had made Steve almost feel like he had come home for the first time in over 75 years.

(Much later, Sam would tell him that Bucky would leave his room and cry in the hallway, far enough away that Steve couldn’t hear. San would tell him that Bucky’d blamed himself and the world and that he had raged against the unfairness of if all. He’ll tell Steve how Bucky put his fist through a wall and how he wiped his eyes dry before marching back into Steve’s room with his shoulders back like he was going into war. But he had never showed that to Steve, never had been anything but strong and optimistic and Steve felt humbled in the face of his strength).

Three months after Steve had woken up, Steve had sat in a pretty therapy room next to a parallel bar and taken a deep breath. Then, with Bucky standing behind him and Sam across the room and the physical therapist by the door, he had pushed himself to his feet. His knuckles had gone white where he was holding on to the parallel bar and he’d felt the tremble all the way up to his shoulders. But, with Bucky’s steady hands hovering an inch away, he had let go. He swayed but held his balance and had managed one shuffling step forward before his right knee had buckled and Bucky had caught him, getting him back to the chair and kissing his forehead.

“You did it,” he had murmured and Steve had nodded into his stomach.

The therapist had come over and clapped his shoulder. “Guess this means you’re going home,” he had said and Steve hadn’t been able to stop smiling.

They boarded the plane the next day. He'd been in a wheelchair but he'd felt healthier than he'd had in years, since that last day he had walked out of that cabin a free man. Stark's private jet had taken them here, to a small town off the Oregon coast and the home Bucky had gotten for them.

Bucky had told him, whispered it on nights in the hospital where Steve's limbs had ached and twitched with a thousand pinpricks, that he'd picked it himself, that he'd found the perfect spot. He'd described it in detail, how Steve would never feel trapped because the windows were so wide and numerous, how the house sat on a bluff in a clearing so that the light was always perfect, how they owned the land all around it so it would always be theirs and they could hide from everyone. He told him about walking on the beach and how they could sit on the upstairs balcony and watch the storms roll across the Pacific.

And Tony has been busy while he'd been in the hospital. With Bucky's permission, he'd carefully designed and renovated the house so it could accommodate Steve upon his release from the hospital. Narrow hallways were widened so Steve's wheelchair could navigate easily and a small elevator was installed in the back. A rooftop greenhouse with a glass ceiling and a hot tub had been added and there was a steel safe room in the basement.

When Steve had first seen it, he had been speechless. Even now, as he goes from their bedroom to the hallway, leaning heavily on his cane, he feels in awe at the amount of care and hope that had gone into this home. His right leg drags just a little and he huffs in annoyance. At the top of the stairs, he pauses, weighing his own ability to navigate down them safely and the indignity of taking the elevator. Experimentally, he tests the weight on his right leg and sighs again before moving to the elevator. It’s not worth Bucky’s anger if he falls.

The first time he had fallen down the stairs, Bucky had been white with fear and anger. He’d called Stark and they’d had been on a private jet to South Korea for exams before he had been able to say “Buck, you’re overreacting. I’m totally fine.” His ankle had been twisted and he’d bruised his left side quite badly - but the serum had kicked in, as normal, and he’d been just as healthy as ever by the time they landed at the hospital. He’d gotten a lecture on not pushing himself and some additional exercises to improve his dexterity going up and down for his troubles.

At least he’s been able to use the cane lately. He goes through periods, changes in the weather, mood, whatever, when the cane is even too much and he ends up back in the dreaded wheelchair. Even now, the chair sits in their closet, waiting for him. It’s not weakness, it’s just sometimes his brain seems to forget how to tell his legs to move. It’s frustrating and Steve thinks that he would’ve given up a long time ago if it hadn’t been for Bucky.

The elevator opens up to the wide living room, light pouring in from every side. Thick couches line the walls and ring a wide stone fireplace with his shield above it. He pauses, reaches to rub two fingers over the star like he does every morning.

"For you," Bucky had said, when they had first arrived after that long flight and Steve had seen it there. "Whenever you want it back."

The official story, from SHOC and repeated on all the news channels worldwide, was that Captain Rogers had bravely infiltrated a Hydra stronghold after he had been ransomed and thought dead. He had fought from the inside to bring the organization down once and for all, dismantling the forcefield that had been protecting Hydra. The morning they had left D.C., the Patriot missiles had successfully destroyed the U.S. Capitol. Really, it was still a mystery how Hydra’s shield had come down. The popular thought, among those in the know, was that somehow the parasite that had invaded Steve’s body had possessed the ability to project it. When it had been killed, the force field had vanished. Steve remembers the wide, prickling sensation of power and thinks that this explanation makes sense.

So all the news channels had proclaimed Captain America was a hero! Stark Industries had released a PR statement, that was repeated ad nauseam through the subsequent days and weeks saying that Steve Rogers had been critically wounded in battle and had been taken to recover quietly in an undisclosed location. The nation, and the world, wished him well. The President have even issued an official statement thanking him for his service. Steve hadn’t been able to read the words without tasting bitterness on his tongue.

SHOC hadn’t bothered - they had too much to do anyway. After the Capitol had been destroyed, Stark had managed to triangulate the location of the base in the North Pole. SHOC units had stormed the base three days later, Wanda leading them. It had been bloody but successful. As far as Steve knew, they were still cataloging all the technology they had found there.

In the immediate aftermath, SHOC had sought an interview with Steve, a debrief they had called it. Stark had been adamant in his refusal to share their location. Last Steve had heard, SHOC had quietly backed down from that battle. He was officially listed on the Avengers’ roster as taking an indefinite medical leave of absence. Bucky was taking a leave of absence too. He’d point blanked refused the first time SHOC had contacted him with a mission. After a brief but vicious argument, Bucky had kept his spot on the team but had been moved to inactive for the foreseeable future.

So, the shield on the mantle is his. He is Captain America. Even if he still didn’t feel it in his own skin. On some dark days, he wonders if he will ever feel strong enough to take up that title again. He has nightmares frequently. Most often, they’re of the prison, of being trapped in a small, cold space with the walls closing in and screaming and screaming, but no one ever coming. He dreams of being trapped in a box, a narrow hole his only connection to the outside world, and watching his friends forget about him while he starves slowly in a dark space. Less frequently, he dreams of that dark red feeling when the parasite had overwhelmed, trapped him in his own head. Often, the dreams merge and wind together, being trapped in prison and his own body and constantly searching for a way out, only to be suffocated. He wakes up screaming from those dreams and Bucky is always there, warm hands on his face and soothing voice in his ear. Sometimes, the only thing that helps is standing on the upstairs balcony, feeling the wild sea breeze and smelling the salt and knowing he’s the furthest place possible from the small, dark spaces. He’ll sit in the hot tub, feel the heat and bubble of the water and the night air on his face and let himself drift and forget.

No one is pressuring him to take up the shield though - and the Avengers are doing fine without him. He watches them on the news sometimes and feels so much pride that these are his friends. They’re okay without him. Tony and Sam and Natasha come frequently for visits and the others send cards and letters when they can. Steve keeps them all in a drawer by his bed.

The last time Sam got injured in a firefight, he’d come out to stay with them to recuperate. Nothing major, he’d insisted, just a broken arm - and then he had arrived with both arms in casts and a set of broken ribs. Bucky had gotten him set up in the downstairs bedroom while Steve had fed him soup at their kitchen table. Sam had been hopped up on pain meds and half asleep, drowsing between bites.

“I miss you,” he’d told Steve, quiet. “But I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you feel safe here.” He had looked up, squinted as though he was looking down a long tunnel. “You’re okay right?”

“I’m okay, Sam,” Steve had said.

Sam had smiled, sweet and tired. “It’s nice here,” he’d said, voice almost slurring with the exhaustion. “It’s warm and happy. It’s like being home.”

Steve had patted his shoulder. “You’ll always have a home here.”

Sam had stayed until he was completely healed. He’d joined them on their beach walks and gardened on roof and, when he’d gotten his casts off, joined Bucky in his awkward beginning attempts at surfing. The waves in their little cove were terrible (at least that’s what Bucky said with conviction every time Steve asked) but that didn’t stop them both from dragging massive long boards into the cold northern Pacific waters and paddling out to try and catch the sloping waves that came in slow sets. Steve joined now and then - he didn’t feel confident enough in his legs to actually try and catch waves, but he liked straddling the board, far enough out that the waves were just gentle swells, and watching the way the water foamed just a little at the top.

Afterward, they would lay in the sand, towels forgotten, until the sun started to set and the chill sent them inside.

It’s late fall now and the surfboards are stashed away but Steve is hoping Sam will be back next summer and they’ll be able to do it all again.

In the kitchen, Bucky is standing in front of the wide window, dressed only in sweatpants. He’s swaying to soft jazz music coming from the speakers above the stove as he fries bacon on the thick bottom skillet. His hair is pulled back and his arm is shining in the sun. He’s beautiful.

Bucky must hear Steve behind him because he turns. His smile is brilliant. “Hey, I made pancakes and bacon. And coffee.” He puts the spatula down and walks over, wraps his arms around Steve’s middle and leans close.

Kissing Bucky always feels like coming home. His hand slides and hooks in the back of Steve’s t-shirt, tugging down just a little, his lips tease just a little at Steve’s mouth, before he pushes them fully together. It’s not a long kiss and after, Bucky tips his forehead so their faces are bent near each other. They’re so close that Steve can see the tiny, darker flecks in his eyes, can see the tiny freckles on the sides of his nose. He can hear his heartbeat and smell the soap he used in the shower that morning.

“Good morning,” Steve says into the space between them and Bucky laughs, clear and happy like this is everything he always wanted. His hair tickles the sides of Steve’s cheeks where it’s pulling loose from the hair tie.

“Your legs okay?” he asks, fingers dropping down to touch Steve’s hand where it’s heavy on the cane.

“Little stiff, nothing some stretches won’t cure.” He huffs at Bucky’s doubtful look. “I’m fine. I even took the elevator this morning just for you.”

Bucky kisses his nose, smacking loudly. “For that, you get an extra pancake.”

They eat breakfast on the patio, just off of the kitchen, He tries to help Bucky set the table - but Bucky shoos him out to the deck, sits him down in one of the thick wooden chairs. The morning sun is a smooth heat against Steve’s skin, soaking and spilling across like the softest brush. He thinks of the hot, claustrophobic heat of laying in the yard in the prison, tiled walls on either side and the pale sun reflecting hot on broken tiles. The feeling builds in his chest until Bucky takes his hands, squeezes their fingers together.

“C’mon,” Bucky says, teasing when Steve tries to get up to help again as he dishes out the pancake and bacon. “I did all this work. At least let me take all of the credit.” He smoothes Steve’s hair back with his metal hand.

Steve leans into the touch, closes his eyes when Bucky tugs gently at the short hairs at the back of his nape. Bucky’s thumb presses the thin skin behind his ear, ghosting over the delicate place where Steve knows he still has a thin white scar from that last surgery that has never gone away. He open his eyes and looks up.

The ocean spreads behind Bucky’s head and the water matches his eyes and, when he smiles, Steve feels like he could never be cold again.

Later, Steve will go to his studio at the side of the house, where every wall is a window, and work on the latest sculpture he’s been attempting. He tried painting and drawing when they first got to the house - but his hand-eye coordination still doesn’t feel steady enough for pencil work or oils. All of his work came out sloppy and imperfect and endlessly frustrating.

It was Natasha that had suggested clay - and Tony who’d had a potter’s wheel, a kiln, what seemed like a metric ton of clay, and all the tools he could possibly find on the internet shipped out to them. Steve hadn’t been sure at first - but dragging his fingers through clay feels solid and right. He can push slowly against the wet stone until it moves into the correct position - and, if he doesn’t like it, he can reform the entire thing into a ball and start over.

His first pieces were bowls and plates and paper weights, whorled in blues and greens and whites. Bucky has them all through out the house. Then came the mugs and the vases and wide dishes to hold sea glass and sea shells or even just pretty rocks that they found by the shore. He did a wide, heavy jar in golds and creams and crimsons, filled it with sea glass, and carefully packaged it up and sent it to Tony. He’d never gotten a reply, but, a week later, Natasha had messaged him a photo of it sitting in Tony’s living room, in the center of the dining table.

Now, he’s been working on a tree, forming a thick trunk, whorled with age. He’ll add branches, long and reaching and sheltering, and then tiny leaves. He wants to twist the branches and the trunk and show the tree at the height of the storm, standing strong against whatever the world throws at it. He plans to give it to Bucky for his birthday.

That evening, he and Bucky will go for a walk along the bluff. Well, Bucky will walk. After a long day at the potter’s wheel, Steve will be sore and shaky and Bucky will insist that he take the wheelchair. Steve will protest but he’ll acquiesce because he doesn’t like making Bucky worry. They’ll walk the bluffs and then wind their way down to the beach and watch the sun slowly burn itself out in the ocean, the sky going pink and orange and purple with its departure. Bucky will bend and kiss his forehead, he’ll run his hand through Steve’s hair, they’ll breathe the same air while the waves crash. The breeze will be cold and salty and Bucky's lips will be warm.

When the stars and the moon come out and dinner has been put away, Bucky will lift him from the chair and carry him to bed and they’ll lay together in bright moonlight, like two halves of a whole, two stanzas of a poem.

And, then later, much later, the world will need saving again. And Steve will take up his shield from the mantle and stand tall on his own two feet, steady and strong. Bucky will be next to him and his team will be behind him. Steve will march into battle and think of a World Fair and a flying car and the years that stretched in between them. He’ll think of getting out of a black SUV and walking up a long white staircase and the handcuffs around his wrists. He’ll think of a snowy field and Bucky’s face and waking up in a hospital with Bucky’s hand in his. He’ll think of this moment, now, by their home, Bucky smiling at him with the blue ocean behind him, wide enough to hold all of their future, wide enough to hold all of their dreams.

He’ll think of how his heart beats to the rhythm of Bucky: when they’re laying on a big bed, pulses and breaths intertwining; when they’re walking down a long sandy beach with the waves lapping at their feet and salt in their hair; when they’re standing back to back in a battlefield, together and never parted. He’ll know that this rhythm is what has always guided him home.

And, he’ll know that the battle has already been won.

 

The end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has been in the works for almost five months - so it's both happy and sad to finally be posting the last chapter. I've loved writing it. I don't think there will be any more stories in this 'verse - but who knows where the muse leads.
> 
> Thank you all for bearing with me over all of this - I've truly appreciated everyone who's taken the time to kudos, comment, or bookmark, or even just read along! I know it got dark in parts - but I hope the fluffiness of this last chapter makes up for it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover for "Such Great Siege" by eyres](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6847861) by [Lovesfic (me23)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/me23/pseuds/Lovesfic)




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